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APPLETONS' NEW HANDY-VOLUME S 



THE 



LAST ESSAYS OF El 



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BY 

CHARLES LAMB 



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NEW YORK: 
D. APPLETON AND OOMP/ 

S49 AND 551 BROADWAY. 
.1879. 



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4 8 6 5 5 5 

AUG -6 1942 



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PEEFAOE. 



BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. 

This poor gentleman, who for some months 
past has been i^ a declining way, hath at length 
paid his final ti u' < e to nature. 

To say the i/ruth, it is time he were gone. 
The humor of the thing, if ever there was much 
in it, was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years' 
and a half existence has been a tolerable duration 
for a phantom. 

I am now at liberty to confess, that much 
which I have heard objected to my late friend's 
writings was well founded. Crude they are, I 
grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite things — 
villainously pranked in an affected array of an- 
tique modes and phrases. They had not been 7iis 
if they had been other than such ; and better it 
is that a writer should be natural in a self -pleas- 
ing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so 
called) that should be strange to him, Egotisti- 



PREFACE. 



1 they have been pronounced by some who did 
not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, 
was often true only (historically) of another ; as 
in a former Essay (to save many instances), where 
under the first 'person (his favorite figure) he 
shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country boy 
placed at a London school, far from his friends 
and connections — in direct opposition to his own 
early history. If it be egotism to imply and 
twine with his own identity the griefs and affec- 
tions of another — making himself many, or re- 
ducing many unto himself — then is the skillful 
novelist, who all along brings in his hero or hero- 
ine speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of 
all ; who yet has never, therefore, been accused 
of that narrowness. And bow shall the intenser 
dramatist escape being faulty, who, doubtless, 
under cover of passion uttered by another, often- 
times gives blameless vent to his most inward 
feelings, and expresses his own story modestly ! 

My late friend was in many respects a singu- 
lar character. Those who did not like him, hated 
him ; and some who once liked him, afterward 
became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave 
himself too little concern what he uttered and in 
whose presence. He observed neither time nor 
place, and would e'en out with what came upper- 
most. With the severe religionist he would pass 
for a free-thinker ; while the other faction set 
him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves 



PREFACE. 5 

that he belied his sentiments. Few understood 
him ; and I am not certain that at all times he 
quite understood himself. He too much affected 
that dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful 
speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. 
He would interrupt the gravest discussion with 
some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrele- 
vant in ears that could understand it. Your long 
and much talkers hated him. The informal habit 
of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment 
of speech, forbade him to be an orator ; and he 
seemed determined that no one else should play 
that part when he was present. He was petit and 
ordinary in his person and appearance. I have 
seen him sometimes in what is called good com- 
pany, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, 
and be suspected for an odd fellow ; till, some 
unlucky occasion provoking it, he would stutter 
out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless, 
perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his 
character for the evening. It was hit or miss 
with him ; but nine times out of ten he contrived 
by this device to send away a whole company his 
enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his 
utterance, and his happiest hnpromptus had the 
appearance of eifort. He has been accused of 
trying to be witty, when in truth he was but 
struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. 
He chose his companions for some individuality 
of character which they manifested. Hence, not 



6 PKEFACE. 

many persons of science, and few professed liter- 
ati, were of his councils. They were, for the 
most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and, 
as to such people commonly nothing is more ob- 
noxious than a gentleman of settled (though mod- 
erate) income, he passed with most of them for a 
great miser. To my knowledge this was a mis- 
take. Hjs intimados, to confess a truth, were in 
the world's eye a ragged regiment. He found 
them floating on the surface of society ; and the 
color, or something else, in the weed pleased him. 
The burrs stuck to him — ^but they were good and 
loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared 
for the society of what are called good people. 
If any of these were scandalized (and offenses 
were sure to arise), he could not help it. When 
he has been remonstrated with for not making 
more concessions to the feelings of good people, 
he would retort by asking, what one point did 
these good people ever concede to him ? He was 
temperate in his meals and diversions, but always 
kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only 
in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought 
a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a 
solvent of speech. Marry — as the friendly vapor 
ascended, how his prattle would cuii up some- 
times with it ! the ligaments which tongue-tied 
him were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded 
a statist ! 

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or 



PREFACE. 7 

rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests 
were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories 
to be found out. He felt the approaches of age ; 
and, while he pretended to cling to life, you saw 
how slender were the ties left to bind him. Dis- 
coursing with him latterly on this subject, he 
expressed himself with a pettishness which I 
thought unworthy of him. In our walks about 
his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shackle- 
well, some children belonging to a school of in- 
dustry had met us, and bowed and courtesied, as 
he thought, in an especial manner to him. " They 
take me for a visiting governor," he muttered 
earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to 
a foible, of looking like anything important and 
parochial. He thought that he approached nearer 
to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion 
from being treated like a grave or respectable 
character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances 
of age that should so entitle him. He herded al- 
ways, while it was possible, with people younger 
than himself. He did not conform to the march 
of time, but was dragged along in the procession. 
His manners lagged behind his years. He was 
too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never 
sat gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions 
of infancy had burned into him, and he resented 
the impertinence of manhood. These were weak- 
nesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to 
explicate some of his writings. 



OOIfTENTS. 



PAGE 
BlAKESMORE in H SHIRE ... 11 

Poor Relations . . . . . .18 

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading . 27 

Imperfect Dramatic Illusion . . . .36 

To THE Shade op Elliston .... 40 

Ellistoniana ..... 44 

The Old Margate Hoy .... 60 

The Convalescent. . . . . .60 

Captain Jackson . . ... 66 

The Superannuated Man . . . . .72 

Barbara S . ..... 81 

The Tombs in the Abbey . . . . .88 

Amicus Redivivus ..... 91 

NuGiB Critics . . . . . .97 

Newspapers Thirty-five Years ago. . . 109 
Barrenness op the Imaginative Faculty in the Pro- 
duction's OF Modern Art . . . 118 



10 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Wedding ...... 132 

Kejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age . 139 
Old China. ...... 146 

The Child Angel : a Dream . , . .168 

Confessions of a Drunkard . . . . 157 

Popular Fallacies . . . , .168 



THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to 
range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine 
old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur 
admit of a better passion than envy ; and contemplations 
on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to 
have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions incom- 
patible with the bustle of modern occupancy and vani- 
ties of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference 
of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty 
and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but 
some present human frailty — an act of inattention on 
the part of some of the auditory, or a trait of affecta- 
tion, or worse, vainglory on that of the preacher — puts 
us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and 
the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holi- 
ness ? — go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys 
of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some 
country church — think of the piety that has kneeled 
there — the congregations, old and young, that have 
found consolation there — the meek pastor — the docile 
parishioner — with no disturbing emotions, no cross 



12 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

conflicting comparisons — drink in the tranquillity of the 
place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless 
as the marble eflSgies that kneel and weep around thee. 

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going 
some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains 
of an old great house with which I had been impressed 
in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner 
of it had lately pulled it down ; still, I had a vague 
notion that it could not all have perished, that so much 
solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed 
all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I 
found it. 

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand 
indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced 
it to — an antiquity. 

I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. 
Where had stood the great gates ? What bounded the 
courtyard ? Whereabout did the out-houses commence ? 
A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which 
was so stately and so spacious. 

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this 
rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their 
proportion. 

Had I seen these brick-and -mortar knaves at their 
process of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I 
should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have 
cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the 
cheerful storeroom, in whose hot window-seat I used 
to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and 
the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that 
ever haunted it about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft 
as summer returns — or a panel of the yellow-room. 

Why, every plank and panel of that house for me 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 13 

Lad magic in it. The tapestried bedrooms — tapestry so 
mucli better tban painting — not adorning merely, but 
peopling the wainscots — at which childhood ever and 
anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced 
as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momen- 
tary eye-encounter with those stern, bright visages star- 
ing reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in colors vivider 
than his descriptions. Actason in mid sprout, with the 
unappeasable prudery of Diana ; and the still more pro- 
voking and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, 
eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. 

Then, that haunted room in which old Mrs. Battle 
died — whereinto I have crept, but always in the day- 
time, with a passion of fear, and a sneaking curiosity, 
terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past. — 
How shall they huild it up again ? 

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted 
but that traces of the splendor of past inmates were 
everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing 
— even to the tarnished gilt leather battledoors, and 
crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which 
told that children had once played there. But I was a 
lonely child, and had the range at will of every apart- 
ment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and wor- 
shiped everywhere. 

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother 
of thought as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and 
admiration. So strange a passion for the place possessed 
me in those years, that, though there lay — I shame to 
say how few roods distant from the mansion — half hid 
by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was 
the spell which bound me to the house, and such my 
carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts. 



14 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

that the idle waters lay unexplored for me ; and not till 
late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I 
found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had 
been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated 
views, extensive prospects — and those at no great dis- 
tance from the house — I was told of such — what were 
they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? 
So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, me- 
thought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison, and 
have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those 
excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with 
that garden -loving poet — 

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; 
And oh, so close your circles lace, 
That I may never leave this place ; 
But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
Ere I your silken bondage break. 
Do you, brambles, chain me too, 
And, courteous briers, nail me through.* 

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides 
—the low-built roof — parlors ten feet by ten — frugal 
boards, and all the homeliness of home — these were the 
condition of my birth — the wholesome soil which I was 
planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tender- 
est lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of some- 
thing beyond ; and to have taken, if but a peep, in child- 
hood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. 

To have the feelings of gentility, it is not necessary 
to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may 
be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an impor- 

* Marvell, on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 15 

tunate race of ancestors ; and the coatless antiquary in his 
unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mow- 
bray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names 
may warm himself into as gay a vanity as these who do 
inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and 
what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it 
trenchant to their swords ? can it be hacked off as a spur 
can ? or torn away like a tarnished garter ? 

What else were the families of the great to us ? what 
pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or 
their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the 
uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did 
not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent 
elevation ? 

Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutch- 
eon, that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely 
stairs, Blakesmoor! have I in childhood so oft stood 
poring upon thy mystic characters — thy emblematic sup- 
porters, with their prophetic " Resurgam " — till, every 
dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself 
Very Gentility ? Thou wert first in my morning eyes ; 
and of nights hast detained my steps from bedward, till 
it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on 
thee. 

This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veri- 
table change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, 
by transfusion. 

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid 
trophy, I know not, I inquired not ; but its fading rags 
and colors cobweb-stained told that its subject was of 
two centuries back. 

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoe- 
tas, feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln 



16 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

— did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trap- 
pings of this once proud ^gon ? repaying by a back- 
ward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped 
in his lifetime upon my poor pastoral progenitor. 

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present 
owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. 
They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for 
a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to myself 
what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to 
soothe my vanity. 

I was the true descendant of those old W s, and 

not the present family of that name, who had fled the 
old waste places. 

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, 
which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my 
own family name, one — and then another — would seem 
to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognize 
the new relationship ; while the rest looked grave, as it 
seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts 
of fled posterity. 

That beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and 
a lamb, that hung next the great bay-window — with the 

bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue, 

so Hke my Alice ! — I am persuaded that she was a true 
Elia — ^Mildred Elia, I take it. From her, and from my 
passion for her — for I first learned love from a picture 
— ^Bridget took the hint of those pretty whimsical lines, 
which thou mayest see, if haply thou hast never seen 
them, reader, in the margin. But my Mildred grew not 
old, like the imaginary Helen. 

High-born Helen, round your dwelling 
These twenty years I've paced in vain; 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 17 

Haughty beauty, thy lover's duty 
Hath been to glory in his pain. 

High-born Helen, proudly telling 

Stories of thy cold disdain ; 
I starve, I die, now you comply, 

And I uo longer can complain. 

These twenty years I've lived on tears, 
, Dwelling for ever on a frown ; 

On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread ; 
I perish now you kind are grown. 

Can I, who loved my beloved 

But for the scorn " was in her eye," 

Can I be moved for my beloved 

When she returns me sigh for sigh ? 

In stately pride, by my bedside. 
High-born Helen's portrait hung ; 

Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays 
Are nightly to the portrait sung. 

To that I weep, nor ever sleep, 
Complaining all night long to her ; 

Helen, grown old, no longer cold, 
Said, " You to all men I prefer." 

Mine, too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, 
with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — 
stately busts in marble — ranged round, of whose coun- 
tenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning 
beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder ; 
but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in 
the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. 

Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one cliair 
of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror 
3 



18 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

of luckless poacher or self-forgetful maiden, so com- 
mon since that bats have roosted in it. 

Mine, too — whose else ? — thy costly fruit-garden, with 
its sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure-garden, 
rising backward from the house in triple terraces, with 
flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here 
and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pris- 
tine state to have been gilt and glittering ; the verdant 
quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, 
in old formality, thy fiery wilderness, the haunt of the 
squirrel and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with 
that antique image in the center, God or Goddess, I wist 
not ; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sin- 
cerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native 
groves than I to that fragmental mystery. 

Was it for this that I kissed my childish hands too 
fervently in your idol-worship, walks and windings of 
Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plow 
passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think 
that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their 
extinguished habitations there may be a hope — a germ 
to be revivified. 



POOR RELATIONS. 

A POOE RELATION is the most irrelevant thing in 
nature — a piece of impertinent correspondency — an 
odious approximation — a haunting conscience — a pre- 
posterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our 
prosperity — an unwelcome remembrancer — a perpetu- 
ally recurring mortification — a drain on your purse — a 



POOR RELATIONS. 19 

more intolerable dun upon your pride— a drawback upon 
success — a rebuke to your rising — a stain in your blood 
— a blot on your 'scutcheon — a rent in your garment — a 
death's head at your banquet — Agathocles's pot — a Mor- 
decai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door — a lion in 
your path — a frog in your chamber — a fly in your oint- 
ment — a mote in your eye — a triumph to your enemy, 
an apology to your friends — the one thing not needful — 
the hail in harvest — the ounce of sour in a pound of 
sweet. 

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you, 

"That is Mr. ." A rap between familiarity and 

respect, that demands, and at the same time seems to 
despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and — 
embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, 
and — draweth it back again. He casually looketh in 
about dinner-time, when the table is full. He offereth 
to go away, seeing you have company, but is induced to 
stay. He fiUeth a chair, and your visitor's two children 
are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh 
upon open days, when your wife says, with some com- 
placency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in to- 
day." He remembereth birth-days, and professeth he 
is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth 
against fish, the turbot being small, yet suffereth himself 
to be importuned into a slice, against his first resolution. 
He sticketh by the port, yet will be prevailed upon to 
empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press 
it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are 
fearful of being too obsequious or not civil enough to 
him. The guests think " they have seen him before." 
Every one speculateth upon his condition ; and the most 
part take him to be — a tide-waiter. He calleth you by 



20 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

your Christian name, to imply that Ms other is the same 
as your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish 
he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity, he might 
pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness, he 
would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. 
He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more 
state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a 
country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent ; 
yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanor, that your 
guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at 
the whist-table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and — 
resents being left out. When the company break up, he 
proffereth to go for a coach — and lets the servant go. 
He recollects your grandfather, and will thrust in some 
mean and quite unimportant anecdote of the family. He 
knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as " he is 
blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to 
institute what he calleth favorable comparisons. With 
a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the 
price of your furniture ; and insults you with a special 
commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opin- 
ion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, 
there was something more comfortable about the old 
teakettle — which you must remember. He dare say you 
must find a great convenience in having a carriage of 
your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. In- 
quireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet ; 
and did not know till lately that such-and-such had been 
the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable ; 
his compliments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay 
pertinacious ; and when he goeth away you dismiss his 
chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel 
fairly rid of two nuisances. 



POOR RELATIONS. 21 

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a 
female poor relation. You may do something with the 
other, you may pass him off tolerably well ; but your 
indigent she-relative is hopeless. " He is an old humor- 
ist," you may say, " and affects to go threadbare. His 
circumstances are better than folks would take them to 
be. You are fond of having a character at your table, 
and truly he is one." But in the indications of female 
poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses 
below herself from caprice. The truth must out with- 
out shuffling. " She is plainly related to the L s ; 

or what does she at their house ? " She is, in all proba- 
bility, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at 
least, this is the case. Her garb is something between 
a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently 
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and 
ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may re- 
quire to be repressed sometimes — aliquando sufflaminan- 
dus erat — but there is no raising her. You send her 
soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped after the gen- 
tlemen. Mr. requests the honor of taking wine 

with her. She hesitates between port and madeira, and 
chooses the former — because he does. She calls the ser- 
vant Sir^ and insists on not troubling him to hold her 
plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's 
governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has 
mistaken the piano for harpsichord. 

Kichard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance 
of the disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of 
affinity constituting a claim to acquaintance may subject 
the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all 
that is betwixt him and a lady with a great estate. His 
stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity 



22 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

of an old woman, who persists in calling him " her son 
Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recom- 
pense his indignities, and float him again upon the bril- 
liant surface, under which it had been her seeming busi- 
ness and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, besides, 
are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an Amlet in 
real life who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. 

Poor W was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine 

classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it 
was too much pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; it 
was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves 
to keep inferiors at a distance ; it only sought to ward 
off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self- 
respect, carried as far as it could go, without infringing 
upon that respect which he would have every one else 
equally maintain for himself. He would have you to 
think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have 
I had with him when we were rather older boys, and 
our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in 
the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys 
and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, 
when we have been out together on a holiday in the 

streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W 

went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the 
dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with 
the aUoy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a 
passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aver-- 
sion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than 
his school array) clung to him with iN'essian venom. 
He thought himself ridiculous in a garb under which 
Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker, 
in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no dis- 
commendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or 



POOR RELATIONS. 23 

in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from 
observation. He found shelter among books which in- 
sult not, and studies that ask no questions of a youth's 
finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared 
for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influ- 
ence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and 
to abstract. He was almost a healthy man, when the 
waywardness of his faith broke out against him with a 

second and worse malignity. The father of "W had 

hitherto exercised the humble profession of house-painter 

at N" , near Oxford. A supposed interest with some 

of the heads of colleges had now induced him to take up 
his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed 
upon some public workst which were talked of. From 
that moment I read in the countenance of the young 
man the determination which at length tore him from 
academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted 
with our universities, the distance between the gowns- 
men and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading 
part of the latter especially — is carried to an excess that 
would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament 

of "W 's father was diametrically the reverse of his 

own. Old W was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, 

who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing 
and scraping, cap in hand, to anything that wore the 
semblance of a gown — ^insensible to the winks and opener 
remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber- 
fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus ob- 
sequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of 

things could not last. W must change the air of 

Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former ; and let 
the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial 
duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction ; 



24 THE LAST ESSAYS OP ELIA. 

he can not estimate the struggle. I stood with W , 

the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of 
his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading 

from the High Street to the back of College, where 

W kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful and 

more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding him 
in a better mood — upon a representation of the Artist 
Evangelist, which the old man, whose aflfairs were be- 
ginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid 
sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a 
token of prosperity or badge of gratitude to his saint. 

W looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, " knew 

his mounted sign — and fled." A letter on his father's 
table the next morning announced that he had accepted 
a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. 
He was among the first who perished before the walls 
of St. Sebastian. 

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began 
with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a 
recital so eminently painful ; but this theme of poor re- 
lationship, is replete with so much matter for tragic as 
well as comic associations, that it is difficult to keep the 
account distinct without blending. The earliest impres- 
sions which I received on this matter are certainly not 
attended with anything painful or very humiliating in 
the recalling. At my father's table (no very splendid 
one) was to be found every Saturday the mysterious fig- 
ure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad 
yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the 
essence of gravity, his words few or none ; and I was 
not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclina- 
tion to do so, for my cue was to admire in silence. A 
particular elbow-chair was appropriated to him, which 



POOR RELATIONS. 25 

was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet 
pudding, wMch appeared on no other occasion, distin- 
guished the days of his coming. I used to think him a 
prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him 
was, that he and ray father had been schoolfellows a 
world ago at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. 
The Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was 
coined — and I thought he was the owner of all that 
money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves 
about his presence. He seemed above human infirmi- 
ties and passions. A sort of melancholy grandeur in- 
vested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied 
him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning. 
A captive — a stately being, let out of the Tower on Sat- 
urdays. Often have I wondered at the temerity of my 
father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which 
we all in common manifested toward him, would ven- 
ture now and then to stand up against him in some argu- 
ment touching their youthful days. The houses of the 
ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my read- 
ers know) between the dwellers on the hill and in the 
valley. This marked distinction formed an obvious divi- 
sion between the boys who lived above (however brought 
together in a common school) and the boys whose pater- 
nal residence was on the plain; a suflBcient cause of hos- 
tility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My father 
had been a leading Mountaineer ; and would still main- 
tain the general superiority in skill and hardihood of 
the Above Boys (his own faction) over the Below Boys 
(so were they called), of which party his contemporary 
had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes 
on this topic — ^the only one upon which the old gentle- 
man was ever brought out — and bad blood bred ; even 



26 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I expected) 
of actual hostilities. But mj father, who scorned to 
insist upon advantages, generally contrived to turn the 
conversation upon some adroit by-commendation of the 
old minster ; in the general preference of which, before 
all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill 
and the plain-born could meet on a conciliating level, 
and lay down their less important differences. Once 
only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I re- 
membered with anguish the thought that came over me : 
" Perhaps he will never come here again." He had been 
pressed to take another plate of the viand which I have 
already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of 
his visits. He had refused with a resistance amounting 
to rigor, when my aunt — an old Lincolnian, but who had 
something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, 
that she would sometimes press civility out of season 
— uttered the following memorable application : "Do 
take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pud- 
ding every day." The old gentleman said nothing at 
the time ; but he took occasion in the course of the 
evening, when some argument had intervened between 
them, to utter, with an emphasis which chilled the com- 
pany, and which chills me now as I write it — " "Woman, 
you are superannuated I " John Billet did not survive 
long after the digesting of this affront ; but he survived 
long enough to assure me that peace was actually re- 
stored ! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was 
discreetly substituted in the place of that which had 
occasioned the offense. He died at the Mint (anno 1781), 
where he had long held what he accounted a comfort- 
able independence ; and, with five pounds fourteen shil- 
lings and a penny, which were found in his escritoire 



DETACHED THOUGHTS. 27 

after Ms decease, left the world, blessing God that he 
had enough to bury him, and that he had never been 
obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was — a Poor 
Relation. 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON" BOOKS AND READ- 
ING. 

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with 
the forced product of another man's brain. Now, I think a 
man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the 
natural sprouts of his own. — Lord Foppington, in the Relapse. 

A.1S ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much 
struck with this bright sally of his lordship, that he has 
left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of 
his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on 
this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsider- 
able portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I 
dream away my life in others' speculations. I lov^e to 
lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walk- 
ing I am reading. I can not sit and think : books think 
for me. 

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too gen- 
teel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read 
anything which I call a hooh There are things in that 
shape which I can not allow for such. 

In this catalogue of hooJcs which are no hooTcs — liblia 
a-'biblia — I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket- 
Books (the Literary excepted), Draught-Boards bound 
and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, 



28 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA, 

Statutes at Large ; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Eobert- 
son, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those vol- 
umes which "no gentleman's library should be with- 
out " ; the Histories of Flavins Josephus (that learned 
Jew), and Paley's "Moral Philosophy." With these 
exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars 
for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things 
in hooTcs' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, 
usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, 
thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down 
a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some 
kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what " seem its 
leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Es- 
say. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam 
Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of block- 
headed Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) 
set out in an array of Kussia or Morocco, when a tithe 
of that good leather would comfortably reclothe my 
shivering folios ; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and 
enable old Raymund LuUy — I have them both, reader — 
to look like himself again in the world. I never see 
these impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my 
ragged veterans in their spoils. 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desidera- 
tum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when 
it can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of 
books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of mag- 
azines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille or half- 
binding (with Russia backs ever) is our costume. A 
Shakespeare or a Milton (unless the first editions), it 
were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The 
possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior 



DETACHED THOUGHTS. 29 

of them (the things themselves being so common), strange 
to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of 
property in the owner. Thomson's " Seasons," again, 
looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog's-eared. 
How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sul- 
lied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odor 
(beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings 
in fastidiousness, of an old Circulating Library " Tom 
Jones " or " Vicar of Wakefield " ! How they speak of 
the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages 
with delight !— of the lone sempstress, whom they may 
have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) 
after her long day's needle-toil, running far into mid- 
night, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from 
sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in 
spelling out their enchanting contents ! Who would 
have them a whit less soiled ? What better condition 
could we desire to see them in ? 

In some respects, the better a book is the less it 
demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and 
all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes — 
Great Nature's Stereotypes — we see them individually 
perish with less regret, because wo know the copies of 
them to be " eterne." But where a book is at once both 
good and rare — where the individual is almost the spe- 
cies, and when tliat perishes, 

We know not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine — 

such a book, for instance, as the " Life of the Duke of 
Newcastle," by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, 
no casing sufficiently durable, to honor and keep safe 
such a jewel. 



30 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Not only rare volumes of this description, wLich 
seem hopeless ever to be reprinted, but old editions of 
writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Mil- 
ton in his prose works. Fuller — of whom we 'haA)e re- 
prints, yet the books themselves, though they go about 
and are talked of here and there, we know, have not 
endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever wiU) in the 
national heart, so as to become stock books — it is good 
to possess these in durable, costly covers. I do not care 
for a First Folio of Shakespeare. You can not make a 
pet book of an author whom everybody reads. I rather 
prefer the common editions of Rowe and Tonson, with- 
out notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably 
bad, serve as maps or modest remembrancers to the text, 
and, without pretending to any supposable emulation 
with it, are so much better than the Shakespeare Gal- 
lery engramngs, which did. I have a community of feel- 
ing with my countrymen about his plays, and I like 
those editions of him best which have been oftenest 
tumbled about and handled. On the contrary, I can not 
read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo 
editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy 
with them, nor with Mr. Gifford's Ben Jonson. If they 
were as much read as the current editions of the other 
poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older 
one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the 
reprint of the " Anatomy of Melancholy." What need 
was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old 
great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the 
latest edition to modern censure ? What hapless station- 
er could dream of Burton ever becoming popular ? The 
wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed 
the sexton of Stratford church to let him whitewash the 



DETACHED THOUGHTS. 31 

painted effigy of old Shakespeare, which stood there, in 
rude hut lively fashion, depicted to the very color of the 
cheek, the eye, the eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used 
to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, however 
imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. 
They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By 
— —y if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire 
I would have clapt both commentator and sexton fast in 
the stocks, for a pair of meddling, sacrilegious varlets. 
I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble- 
tombs. 

Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the 
names of some of our poets sound sweeter and have a 
finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — than that of 
Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be that the latter 
are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. 
The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the 
mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Haw- 
thornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when an5 where you read a book. 
In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is 
quite ready, who would think of taking up the " Fairy 
Queen" for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andre wes's 
sermons ? 

MDton almost requires a solemn service of music to 
be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his 
music — to which, who listens, had need bring docile 
thoughts and purged ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of 
ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a sea- 
son, the "Tempest," or his own " Winter's Tale." 

These two poets you can not avoid reading aloud — to 
yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listen- 



32 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

ing. More than one — and it degenerates into an au- 
dience. 

Books of quick interest, tliat hurry on for incidents, 
are for the eye to glide over solely. It will not do to 
read them out. I could never listen to even the better 
kind of modern novels vp-ithout extreme irksomeness. 

A newspaper read out is intolerable. In some of the 
bank ofl&ces it is the custom (to save so much individual 
time) for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to 
commence upon the " Times " or the " Chronicle," and 
recite its entire contents aloud, fro Ixrno publico. With 
every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is sin- 
gularly vapid. In barbers' shops and public houses a 
fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph, which he 
communicates as some discovery. Another follows with 
Ms selection. So the entire journal transpires at length 
by piecemeal. Seldom readers are slow readers, and, 
without this expedient, no one in the company would 
probably ever travel through the contents of a whole 
paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. \ Ko one ever 
lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.^ 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at 
Nando's, keeps the paper ! I am sick of hearing the 
waiter bawling out incessantly, " The ' Chronicle ' is in 
hand, sir." 

As in these little diurnals I generally skip the For- 
eign News, the Debates, and the Politics I find the 
" Morning Herald " by far the most entertaining of them. 
It is an agreeable miscellany rather than a newspaper. 

Coming into an inn at night — having ordered your 
supper — what can be more delightful than to find lying 
in the window-seat, left there time out of mind by the 



DETACHED THOUGHTS. 33 

carelessness of some former guest, two or three numbers 
of the old "Town and Country Magazine," with its amus- 
ing tete-d-tete pictures — "The Eoyal Lover and Lady 

G ," " The Melting Platonic and the old Beau," and 

such like antiquated scandal ? Would you exchange it — 
at that time and in that place — for a better book ? 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it 
so much for the weightier kinds of reading — the " Para- 
dise Lost " or " Comus " he could have read to him — 
but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his 
own eye a magazine or a light pamphlet. 

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues 
of some cathedral alone, and reading " Candide " ! 

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than 
having been once detected, by a familiar damsel, reclined 
at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythe- 
ra), reading "Pamela." There was nothing in the book 
to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure ; but 
as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined 
to read in company, I could have wished it had been — 
any other book. "We read on very sociably for a few 
pages ; and, not finding the author much to her taste, 
she got up and went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to 
thee to conjecture whether the blush (for there was one 
between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain 
in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret. 

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. 
I can not settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian 
minister, who was generally io be seen upon Snow Hill 
(as yet Skinner's Street was not) between the hours of 
ten and eleven in the morning, studying a vokime of 
Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstrac- 
tion beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled 
3 



34 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate 
encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread-basket, would 
have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master 
of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five 
points. 

I was once amused — there is a pleasure in affecting 
affectation — at the indignation of a crowd that was jos- 
tling in with me at the pit-door of Covent Garden Thea- 
tre, to have a sight of Master Betty — then at once in his 
dawn and his meridian — in " Hamlet." I had been in- 
vited quite unexpectedly to join a party, whom I met 
near the door of the play-house, and I happened to have 
in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens's 
Shakespeare, which, the time not admitting of my car- 
rying it home, of course went with me to the theatre. 
Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening 
— the rush^ as they term it — I deliberately held the vol- 
ume over my head, open at the scene in which the young 
Eoscius had been most cried np, and quietly read by 
the lamp-light. The clamor became universal. " The 
affectation of the fellow 1 " cried one. " Look at that 
gentleman reading^ papa," squeaked a young lady, who 
in her admiration of the novelty almost forgot her fears. 
I read on. " He ought to have his book knocked out of 
his hand," exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms were too 
fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his kind 
intention. Still I read on, and, till the time came to pay 
my money, kept as unmoved as St, Anthony at his Holy 
Offices, with satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins mopping and 
making mouths at him in the picture, while the good 
man sits undisturbed at the sight as if he were sole ten- 
ant of the desert. The individual rabble (I recognized 
piore than one of their ugly faces) had damned a slight 



DETACHED THOUGHTS. 35 

piece of mine but a few nights before, and I was deter- 
mined the culprits should not a second time put me out 
of countenance. 

There is a class of street-readers whom I can never 
contemplate without affection — the poor gentry, who, 
not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a 
little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his 
hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, 
and thinking when they will have done. Venturing 
tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when 
he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny 
themselves the gratification, they " snatch a fearful joy." 

Martin B , in this way, by daily fragments, got 

through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper 
damped his laudable ambition by asking him (it was in 
his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the 
work. M. declares that under no circumstance in his 
life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction 
which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poet- 
ess of our day has moralized upon this subject in two 
very touching but homely stanzas : 

THE TWO BOYS. 

I saw a boy with eager eye 

Open a book upon a stall, 

And read as he'd devour it all ; 

Which when the stall-man did espy, 

Soon to the boy I heard him call, 

" You, sir, you never buy a book. 

Therefore in one you shall not look." 

The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 

He wish'd he never had been taught to read ; 

Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. 



36 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Of sufferings the poor have many, 

Which never can the rich annoy. 

I soon perceived another boy, 

Who looked as if he had not any 

Food — ^for that day at least — enjoy 

The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 

This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, 

Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, 

Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 

No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat. 



IMPERFECT DRAMATIC ILLUSION. 

A PLAT is said to be well or ill acted, in proportion 
to the scenicai illusion produced. Whether such illusion 
can in any case be perfect, is not the question. The 
nearest approach to it, we are told, is when the actor 
appears wholly unconscious of the presence of specta- 
tors. In tragedy — in all which is to affect the feelings 
— this undivided attention to his stage business seemed 
indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every 
day by our cleverest tragedians ; and while these refer- 
ences to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment, 
are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity of 
illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest may be 
said to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy 
apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters 
in comedy, especially those which are a little extrava- 
gant, or which involve some notion repugnant to the 
moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in 
the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an 



IMPERFECT DRAMATIC ILLUSION. 37 

audience, he keeps up a tacit understanding with them, 
and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a party 
in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the 
mode of doing this ; but we speak only of the great 
artists in the profession. 

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to 
feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, per- 
haps, cowardice. To see a coward done to the life upon 
a stage would produce anything but mirth. Yet we most 
of us remember Jack Banister's cowards. Could any- 
thing be more agreeable, more pleasant ? We loved the 
rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art 
of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the 
spectators, even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that 
he was not half such a coward as vre took him for? 
We saw all the common symptoms of the malady upon 
him : the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth 
chattering; and could have sworn "that man was fright- 
ened." But we forgot all the while — or kept it almost 
a secret to ourselves — that he never once lost his self- 
possession ; that he let out by a thousand droll looks 
and gestures — meant at us, and not at all supposed to be 
visible to his fellows in the scene — that his confidence in 
his ov,^n resources had never once deserted him. Was 
this a genuine picture of a coward ? or not rather a like- 
ness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us 
instead of an original ; while we secretly connived at 
the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure than a 
more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helpless- 
ness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be con- 
comitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us ? 

Why are misers so hateful in the world and so endur- 
able on the stage, but because the skillful actor, by a sort 



38 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

of sub-reference rather than direct appeal to us, dis- 
arms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by 
seeming to engage our compassion for the insecure tenure 
by which he holds his money-bags and parchments ? By 
this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character 
— the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself 
up from the sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser 
becomes sympathetic — i. e., is no genuine miser. Here, 
again, a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disa- 
greeable reality. 

Spleen, irritability, the pitiable infirmities of old men, 
which produce only pain to behold in the realities, coun- 
terfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic 
appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction 
that they are leing acted before us ; that a likeness only 
is going on, and not the thing itself. They please by 
being done under the life, or beside it, not to the life. 
When Gattie acts an old man, is he angry indeed ? or 
only a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to 
recognize, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of 
a reality ? 

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too 
natural. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing 
could be more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. 
Emery. This told excellently in his Tyke, and charac- 
ters of a tragic cast ; but when he carried the same rig-id 
exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and will- 
ful blindness and oblivion of everything before the cur- 
tain, into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant 
effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the per- 
8onm dramatis. There was as little link between him and 
them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a 
third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individ- 



IMPERFECT DRAMATIC ILLUSION. 39 

ually considered, his execution was masterly. But com- 
edy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, that 
the same degree of credibihty is not required of it as of 
serious scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded of 
the two things may be illustrated by the different sort 
of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mourn- 
ful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of false- 
hood in any one tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears 
refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller 
of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are con- 
tent with less than absolute truth. 'Tis the same with 
dramatic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see 
an audience naturalized behind the scenes, taken into the 
interest of the drama, welcomed as bystanders, however. 
There is something ungracious in a comic actor holding 
himself aloof from all participation or concern with those 
who are come to be diverted by him. Macbeth must 
see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it ; but 
an old fool in farce may think he sees something, and by 
conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he 
can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an imperti- 
nent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon 
the serious passions of the scene, we approve of the con- 
tempt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant 
impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give 
delight and raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, wor- 
ries the studious man with taking up his leisure, or mak- 
ing his house his home, the same sort of contempt ex- 
pressed (however natural) would destroy the balance of 
delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, 
the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little de- 
sert nature ; he must, in short, be thinking of the audi- 
ence, and express only so much dissatisfaction and peev- 



40 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

isliness as is consistent with tlie pleasure of comedy. In 
other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If 
he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in 
earnest, and more especially if he deliver ^lis expostula- 
tions in a tone which in the world must necessarily pro- 
voke a duel, his real-life manner will destroy the whim- 
sical and purely dramatic existence of the other character 
(which, to render it comic, demands an antagonist comi- 
cality on the part of the character opposed to it), and 
convert what was meant for mirth, rather than beUef, 
into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, which 
would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to 
see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy person. A 
very Judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have 
fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. 
Wrench in the farce of " Free and Easy." 

Many instances would be tedious ; these may suffice 
to show that comic acting at least does not always 
demand from the performer that strict abstraction from 
all reference to an audience which is exacted of it ; but 
that in some cases a sort of compromise may take place, 
and an the purposes of dramatic delight be attained by 
a judicious understanding, not too openly announced, 
between the ladies and gentlemen on both sides of the 
curtain. 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTOK 

JoTOUBEST of once embodied spirits, whither at length 
hast thou flown? to what genial region are we permitted 
to conjecture that thou hast flitted ? 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 41 

Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest- time 
was still to come with thee) upon casual sands of Aver- 
nus ? or art thou enacting Eovee (as we would gladlier 
think) by wandering Elysian streams ? 

This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief 
antics among us, was in truth anything but a prison to 
thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this tody to be no 
better than a county jail, forsooth, or some house of 
durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. 
Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off 
those gyves, and hadst notice to quit, I fear, before thou 
wert quite ready to abandon this fleshy tenement. It 
was thy Pleasure -House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices ; 
thy Louvre, or thy "Whitehall. 

What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now ? 
or when may we expect thy aerial house-warming? 

Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed 
Shades : now can not I intelligibly fancy thee in either. 

Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the 
schoolmen admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs 
and unchrisom babes) there may exist — ^not far perchance 
from that storehouse of all vanities, which Milton saw in 
vision — a Limbo somewhere for Playees ? and that 

Up thither like aerial vapors fly 

Both all Stage things, and all that m Stage things 

Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame ? 

All the unaccomplished works of Authors' hands, 

Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, 

Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — 

Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery. 

There, by the neighboring moon (by some not im- 
properly supposed thy Kegent Planet upon earth), mayst 



42 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

thou not still be acting thy managerial pranks, great 
disembodied Lessee, but Lessee still, and still a manager? 

In green-rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse 
beholds thee wielding posthumous empire. 

Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) 
circle thee in endlessly, and still their song is ^'' Fie on 
sinful Phantasy ! " 

Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of 
earth, Eobeet William Elliston ! for as yet we know 
not thy new name in heaven. 

It irks me to think that, stripped of thy regalities, 
thou shouldst ferry over, a poor forked shade, in crazy 
Stygian wherry. Methinks I hear the old boatmau, 
paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice, bawl- 
ing " Sculls, Sculls " ; to which, with waving hand and 
majestic action, thou deignest not to reply, other than in 
two curt monosyllables, "IsTo; Oars." 

But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small differ- 
ence between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy ; 
and, if haply your dates of life were conterminent, you 
are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (0 igno- 
ble leveling of Death !) with the shade of some recently 
departed candle- snuffer. 

But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of his- 
trionic robes and private vanities, what denudations to 
the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit you to set 
a foot within his battered lighter! 

Crowns, scepters ; shield, sword, and truncheon ; 
thy own coronation robes (for thou hast brought the 
whole property-man's Avardrobe with thee, enough to 
sink a navy) ; the judge's ermine ; the coxcomb's wig ; 
the snuff-box d, la Foppington — all must overboard, he 
positively swears ; and that Ancient Mariner brooks no 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 43 

denial ; for, since tbe tiresome monodrame of the old 
Tliracian Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath 
shown small taste for theatricals. 

A J, now 'tis done. You are just boat-weight : pura 
et puta anima. 

But, bless me, how little you look ! 

So shall we all look — kings and kaisers— stripped for 
the last voyage. 

But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, 
and thrice pleasant shade ! with my parting thanks for 
many an hour of life lightened by thy harmless extrava- 
ganzas, public or domestic. 

Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, 
leaving to his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest 
Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weighing their 
party-colored existence here upon earth — making account 
of the few foibles that may have shaded thy real life^ as 
we call it (though, substantially, scarcely less a vapor 
than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury), as 
but of so many echoes, natural repercussions, and results 
to be expected from the assumed extravagancies of thy 
secondary or mock life, nightly upon a stage — after a 
lenient castigation, with rods hghter than of those Me- 
dusean ringlets, but just enough to " whip the offending 
Adam out of thee," shall courteously dismiss thee at the 
right-hand gate — the O. P. side of Hades — that conducts 
to masques and merrymakings in the Theatre Eoyal of 
Proserpine. 

PLAUDITO, ET VALETO. 



44 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 



ELLISTONIANA. 

My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose 
loss we all deplore, was but slight. 

My first introduction to E., which afterward ripened 
into an acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, 
was over a counter in the Leamington Spa Library, then 
newly entered upon by a branch of his family. E., whom 
nothing misbecame — to auspicate, I suppose, the filial 
concern, and set it agoing with a luster — was serving in 
person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop 
ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but in 
reality to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping 
some conference. With what an air did he reach down 
the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion of the 
worth of the work in question, and launching out into 
a dissertation on its comparative merits with those of 
certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals! his 
enchanted customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued 
to their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a gen- 
tleman in comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold 
his gloves in King Street. I admired the histrionic art 
by which he contrived to carry clean away every notion 
of disgrace from the occupation he had so generously 
submitted to ; and from that hour I judged him, with no 
after repentance, to be a person with whom it would be 
a felicity to be more acquainted. 

To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be 
superfluous. With his blended private and professional 
habits alone I have to do ; that harmonious fusion of the 
manners of the player into those of every-day life, which 



ELLISTONIANA. 45 

brought the stage-hoards into streets and dining-parlors, 
and kept up the play when the play was ended. 

"I like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one 
day, " because he is the same natural, easy creature on 
the stage that he is ojf." " My case exactly," retorted 
Elliston — with a charming forgetfulness that the con- 
verse of a proposition does not always lead to the same 
conclusion — "I am the same person oj^the stage that I 
am on." The inference, at first sight, seems identical ; 
but examine it a little, and it confesses only that the one 
performer was never, and the other always, acting. 

And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private 
deportment. You had spirited performance always going 
on before your eyes, with nothing to pay. As where a 
monarch takes up his casual abode for a night, the poor- 
est hovel which he honors by his sleeping in it becomes 
iipso facto for that time a palace ; so wherever Elliston 
walked, sat, or stood still, there was the theatre. He 
carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and 
set up his portable playhouse at corners of streets and in 
the market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod 
the boards still ; and if his theme chanced to be passion- 
ate, the green-baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose 
beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a 
love for his art. So Apelles always painted — ^in thought. 
So G. D. always poetizes. I hate a lukewarm artist. I 
have known actors — and some of them of Elliston's own 
stamp — who shall have agreeably been amusing you in 
the part of a rake or a coxcomb through the two or 
three hours of their dramatic existence ; but no sooner 
does the curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a spirit 
of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. They emerge 
sour, morose persons, intolerable to their families, ser- 



46 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

vants, etc. Another shall have been expanding your 
heart with generous deeds and sentiments, till it even 
beat with yearnings of universal sympathy ; you abso- 
lutely long to go home and do some good action. The 
play seems tedious, till you can get fairly out of the 
house and realize your laudable intentions. At length 
the final bell rings, and this cordial representative of all 
that is amiable in human breasts steps forth — a miser. 
EUiston was more of a piece. Did he play Eanger, and 
did Eanger fill the general bosom of the town with satis- 
faction ? why should he not be Eanger, and diffuse the 
same cordial satisfaction among his private circles ? with 
his temperament, his animal spirits, his good nature, his 
follies perchance, could he do better than identify him- 
self with his impersonation ? Are we to like a pleasant 
rake or coxcomb on the stage, and give ourselves airs of 
aversion for the identical character presented to us in 
actual life? or what would the performer have gained 
by divesting himself of the impersonation ? Could the 
man EUiston have been essentially different from his 
part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, 
in private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, 
and scapegoat trickeries of his prototype ? 

" But there is something not natural in this everlast- 
ing acting ; we want the real man." 

Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, 
whom you can not or will not see, under some adventi- 
tious trappings, which, nevertheless, sit not at all incon- 
sistently upon him ? What if it is the nature of some 
men to be highly artificial ? The fault is least reprehen- 
sible in players. Gibber was his own Foppington, with 
almost as much wit as Yanbrugh could add to it. 

" My conceit of his person " — it is Ben Jonson speak- 



ELLISTONIANA. 47 

ing of Lord Bacon — " was never increased toward him 
by his place or honors. But I have, and do reverence 
him for the greatness that was only proper to himself ; 
in that he seemed to me ever one of the greatest men 
that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever 
prayed that Heaven would give him strength ; for great- 
ness he could not want." 

The quality here commended was scarcely less con- 
spicuous in the subject of these idle reminiscences than 
in my Lord Yerulam. Those who have imagined that 
an unexpected elevation to the direction of a great Lon- 
don theatre affected the consequence of Elliston, or at 
all changed his nature, knew not the essential greatness 
of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune 
to encounter him near St. Dunstan's Church (which, 
with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust and 
a shadow) on the morning of his election to that high 
office. Grasping my hand with a look of significance, 
he only uttered, "Have you heard the news?" — then, 
with another look following up the blow, he subjoined, 
" I am the future Manager of Drury Lane Theatre." 
Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratula- 
tion or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to 
chew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, 
nothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone 
could muse his praise. This was in his great style. 

But was he less great (be witness, O ye Powers of 
Equanimity, that supported in the ruins of Carthage the 
consular exile, and more recently transmuted, for a more 
illustrious exile, the barren constableship of Elba into an 
image of Imperial France) when, in melancholy after- 
years, again, much near the same spot, I met him, when 
that scepter had been wrested from his hand, and his 



48 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

dominion was curtailed to the petty managersliip and 
part proprietorship of the small Olympic, Tiis JElbaf 
He still played nightly upon the boards of Drury, hut in 
parts, alas! allotted to Mm, not magnificently distrib- 
uted by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and 
magnificently sinking the sense of fallen material gran- 
deur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations 
done to his more lofty intellectual pretensions — " Have 
youheard" (his customary exordium) — "have youheard," 
said he, " how they treat me ? they put me in comedy ^ 
Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal 
interruption — " Where could they have put you better ? " 
Then, after a pause — " Where I formerly played Romeo, 
I now play Mercutio." And so again he stalked away, 
neither staying nor caring for responses. 

Oh, it was a rich scene — but Sir A , the 

best of. story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame 
narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could 
do Justice to it — tbat I was a witness to in the tarnished 
room (that had once been green) of that same little Olym- 
pic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury, 
he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was Ms 
" highest heaven " ; himself " Jove in his chair." There 
he sat in state, while before him, on complaint of prompt- 
er, was brought for judgment — ^how shall I describe her? 
— one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails 
of choruses — a probationer for the town, in either of 
its senses — the pertest little drab — a dirty fringe and ap- 
pendage of the lamp's smoke — who, it seems, on some 
disapprobation expressed by a " highly respectable " 
audience, had precipitately quitted her station on the 
boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust. 

" And how dare you," said her manager, assuming a 



ELLISTONIANA. 49 

ceusorial severity, which would have crushed the confi- 
dence of a Yestris, and disarmed that beautiful Eebel 
herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe he 
thought her standing before him — " how dare you, 
madam, withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your 
theatrical duties?" " I was hissed, sir." "And you 
have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the 
town? " " I don't know that, sir, but I will never stand 
to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence — 
when, gathering up his features into one significant mass 
of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation — in a les- 
son never to have been lost upon a creature less forward 
than she who stood before him — his words were these : 
" They have hissed we." 

'Twas the identical argument a fortiori^ which the 
son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, 
to persuade him to take his destiny with a good grace : 
*' I, too, am mortal." And it is to be believed that in 
both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want 
of a proper understanding with the faculties of the re- 
spective recipients. 

" Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was cour- 
teously conducting me over the benches of his Surrey 
Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every-day 
waning grandeur. 

Those who knew Elliston will know the manner in 
which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few 
words I am about to record. One proud day to me he 
took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I 
had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather 
plentiful partaking of the meager banquet, not unre- 
freshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort 
of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that 
4 



50 THE LAST ESSAYS OE ELIA. 

for my own part I never ate but one dish at dinner. '' I, 
too, never eat but one thing at dinner," was his reply — 
then, after a pause — " reckoning fish as nothing." The 
manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sen- 
tence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savory 
esculents which the pleasant and nutritious food-giving 
Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery 
bosom. This was greatness^ tempered with considerate 
tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming 
entertainer. 

Great wert thou in thy hfe, Kobert William Elliston, 
and not lessened in thy death, if report speaks truly, 
which says that thou didst direct that thy mortal remains 
should repose under no inscription but one of pure La- 
tinity. Classical was thy bringing up ; and beautiful 
was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the 
man with the boy, took thee back, in thy latest exercise 
of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Thea- 
tres and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early 
ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and 
pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In ele- 
gies that shall silence this crude prose they shall celebrate 
thy praise. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have 
said so before) at one or other of the Universities. Next 
to these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, 
such as the neighborhood of Henley affords in abun- 
dance, on the banks of my beloved Thames. But some- 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 51 

how or other my cousin contrives to wheedle me, once 
in three or four seasons, to a watering-place. Old at- 
tachments cling to her in spite of experience. We have 
been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton 
another, dullest at Eastbourne a third, and are at this 
moment doing dreary penance at — Hastings ! — and all be- 
cause we were happy many years ago for a brief week at — 
Margate. That was our first seaside experiment, and many 
circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable hol- 
iday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we 
had never been from home so long together in company. 

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy 
weather-beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accom- 
modations — ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh- 
water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the 
winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freight- 
age, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes and spells and 
boiling caldrons. With the gales of heaven thou went- 
est swimmingly ; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest 
still with sailor-like patience. Thy course was natural, 
not forced, as in a hot-bed ; nor didst thou go poisoning 
the breath of ocean with sulphurous smoke — a great sea 
chimera, chimneying and furnacing the deep ; or liker to 
that fire-god parching up Scamander. 

Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their 
coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of any- 
thing like contempt) to the raw questions which we of 
the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, 
as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement ? 
Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou 
shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating in- 
terpreter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable 
ambassador between sea and land ! — whose sailor-trou- 



52 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

sers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an 
adopted denizen of the former than thy white cap and 
whiter apron over them, with thy neat-fingered practice 
in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of 
inland nurture heretofore — a master cook of Eastcheap ? 
How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, 
cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain : here, there, like 
another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, 
yet with kindlier ministrations — ^not to assist the tem- 
pest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our in- 
firmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion 
might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when 
the o'er- washing billows drove us below deck (for it was 
far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing weath- 
er), how did thy officious ministerings, still catering for 
our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cor- 
dial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confine- 
ment of thy else (truth to say) not very savory nor very 
inviting little cabin ? 

With these additaments to boot, we had;on board a 
fellow passenger, whose discourse in verity might have 
beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have 
made mirth and wonder abound as far as from Thames 
to the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned 
young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like 
assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. 
He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then or 
since. He was none of your hesitating, half story-tell- 
ers (a most painfal description of mortals), who go on 
sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as 
they see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pick- 
pockets of your patience — but one who committed down- 
right daylight depredations upon his neighbor's faith. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 53 

He did not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a 
hearty, thorough-paced liar, and plunged at once into 
the depths of your credulity. I partly believe he made 
pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many 
wise, or learned, composed at that time the common 
stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a 
set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a 
worse name) as Thames or Tooley Street at that time of 
day could have supplied. There might be an exception 
or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious 
distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's 
company as those were whom I sailed with. Something, 
too, must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the 
confident fellow told us half the legends on land which 
he favored us with on the other element, I flatter myself 
the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But 
we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar 
about us, and the time and place disposed us to the re- 
ception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has 
obliterated from my memory much of his wild fablings ; 
and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be 
read on shore. He had been Aide-de-camp (among other 
rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian Prince, and at 
one blow had stricken off the head of the King of Cara- 
mania on horseback. He, of course, married the Prince's 
daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of 
that court, combining with the loss of his consort, was 
the reason of his quitting Persia; but, with the rapidity of 
a magician, he transported himself, along with his hear- 
ers, back to England,, where we still found him in the 
confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a 
Princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — ^having intrusted to 
his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some 



54 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

extraordinary occasion ; but, as I am not certain of tlie 
name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must 
leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the 
honor among themselves in private. I can not call to 
mind half his pleasant wonders ; but I perfectly remem- 
ber that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoe- 
nix ; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error 
that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring 
us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper 
Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listen- 
ers. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond 
the " ignorant present." But when (still hardying more 
and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went 
on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs 
of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to 
make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good 
sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth that 
had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, 
who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the 
gentleman that there must be some mistake, as " the 
Colossus in question had been destroyed long since " ; to 
whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was 
obliging enough to concede thus much, that " the figure 
was indeed a little damaged." This was the only oppo- 
sition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger 
him, for he proceeded with his fables, which the same 
youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency 
than ever — confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candor 
of that concession. With these prodigies he wheedled 
us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one 
of our own company (having been the voyage before) 
immediately recognizing, and pointing out to us, was 
considered by us as no ordinary seaman. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 55 

All this .time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a 
different character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, 
very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the 
sea, with a smile ; and, if he caught now and then some 
snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident, and 
they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him 
whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being 
with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring 
without stirring ; and when some of us pulled out our 
private stores — our cold meat and our salads — he pro- 
duced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary 
biscuit he had laid in — provision for the one or two days 
and nights to which these vessels then were oftentimes 
obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer ac- 
quaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court 
nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate 
with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there 
for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which ap- 
peared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great 
hopes of a cure ; and when we asked him whether he 
had any friends where he was going, he replied "he had 
no friends." 

These pleasant and some mournful passages, with the 
first sight of the sea, cooperating with youth, and a sense 
of holidays and out-of-door adventure, to me that had 
been pent up in populous cities for many months before 
— ^have left upon my mind the fragrance as of* summer 
days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remem- 
brance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon. 

Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some 
unwelcome comparisons), if I endeavor to account for 
the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many persons 
confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this 



56 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

occasion) at the sight of the sea for the first time ? I 
think the reason usually given — referring to the incapa- 
city of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions 
of them — scarcely goes deep enough into the question. 
Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, 
for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel 
himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that 
space which the idea of them seemed to take up in his 
mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first 
notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a 
very similar impression ; enlarging themselves (if I may 
say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disap- 
pointment. Is it not, that in the latter we had ex- 
pected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but I am afraid, by 
the law of imagination, unavoidably) not a definite ob- 
ject, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable 
by the eye, but all the sea at once, the commensueate 

ANTAGONIST OF THE EAETH ? I do UOt Say WC tell OUr- 

selves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be sat- 
isfied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a 
young person of fifteen (as I then was), knowing nothing 
of the sea but from description. He comes to it for the 
first time — all that he has been reading of it all his life, 
and that the most enthusiastic part of life, all he has 
gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, what he 
has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as 
credulously from romance and poetry, crowding their 
images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. 
He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down 
unto it ; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents 
it washes ; of its receiving the mighty Plate or Orellana 
into its bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmen- 
tation ; of Biscay swells and the mariner 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY, 57 

For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
Incessant laboring round the stormy Cape ; 

of fatal rocks, and the " still-vexed Bermoothes " ; of 
great whirlpools, and the water-spout ; of sunken ships, 
and the sunless treasures swallowed up in the unrestor- 
ing depths ; of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all 
that is terrible upon earth 

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, 
Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ; 

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and 
shells ; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles ; of mer- 
maids' grots — 

I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to he 
shown all these wonders at once, hut he is under the 
tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with 
confused hints and shadows of all these ; and when the 
actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather, 
too, most likely) from our unromantic coasts — a speck, 
a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it 
prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive en- 
tertainment ? Or if he has come to it from the mouth 
of a river, was it much more than the river widening ? 
and, even out of the sight of land, what had he but a flat, 
watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the 
vast o'ercurtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily 
without dread and amazement? Who, in similar cir- 
cumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Oha- 
roha, in the poem of Gebir — 

Is this the mighty ocean ? is this all ! 

I love town or country ; but this detestable Cinque 



58 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting 
out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures 
of dustj, innutritions rocks, whicli the amateur calls 
" verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and 
they show me stunted coppices. I crj out for the water- 
brooks, and pant for fresh streams and inland murmurs. 
I can not stand all day on the naked beach, watching the 
capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colors of a 
dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows 
of this island prison. I would fain retire into the inte- 
rior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to 
be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, 
as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so 
feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. 
There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of 
fugitive resort, a heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews 
and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses 
that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in 
its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, 
a fair, honest, fishing town, and no more, it were some- 
tliing : with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered 
about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched 
from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell 
with Meshech, to assort with fisher-swains and smug- 
glers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this 
latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. 
I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs 
nothing but the revenue — an abstraction I never greatly 
cared about. I could go out with them in their mack- 
erel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with 
some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor vic- 
tims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the 
beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 59 

illicit countrymen — townsfolk or brethren perchance — 
whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cut- 
lasses (their only solace), who, under the mild name of 
preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in 
the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their 
detestation of run hoUands, and zeal for Old England. 
But it is the visitants from town that come here to say 
that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea 
than a pond-perch or a dace might be supposed to have, 
that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these 
regions, and have as little toleration for myself here as 
for them. What can they want here? If they had a 
true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this 
land luggage with them ? or why pitch their civilized 
tents in the desert ? What mean these scanty book- 
rooms — marine libraries as they entitle them — if the sea 
were, as they would have us believe, a book " to read 
strange matter in " ? What are their foolish concert- 
rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to 
do, to listen to the music of the waves ? All is false and 
hollow pretension. They come because it is the fashion, 
and to spoil the nature of the place. They are, mostly, 
as I have said, stock-brokers ; but I have watched the 
better sort of them. Now and then an honest citizen (of 
the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring 
down his wife and daughters to taste the sea breezes. I 
always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see 
it in their countenance. A day or two they go wander- 
ing on the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and think- 
ing them great things ; but, in a poor week, imagination 
slackens : they begin to discover that cockles produce no 
pearls, and then — O then ! — if I could interpret for the 
pretty creatures (I know they have not the courage to 



60 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

confess it themselves), how gladly would they exchange 
their seaside rambles for a Sunday walk on the green- 
sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows ! 

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, 
who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, 
what would their feelings be if some of the unsophisti- 
cated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their cour- 
teous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of 
such assured sympathy between them, to return the visit, 
and come up to see — London. I must imagine them 
with their fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our 
town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in 
Lothbury. What vehement laughter would it not excite 
among 

The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard Street. 

I am sure that no town -bred or inland-born subjects 
can feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea- 
places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners 
and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam 
seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured 
as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would 
exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow 
for ever about the banks of Tamesis, 



THE CONVALESCENT. 

A PEETTT severe fit of indisposition which, under the 
name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for 
some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has re- 



THE CONVALESCENT. Gl 

duced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon any topic 
foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from 
me this month, reader ; I can offer you only sick men's 
dreams. 

And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for 
what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie 
abed, and draw daylight curtains about him, and, shut- 
ting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the 
works which are going on under it ? — to become insen- 
sible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of 
one feeble pulse ? 

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the 
patient lords it there! what caprices he acts without 
control! how king-like he sways his pillow — tumbling, 
and tossing, and shifting, and raising, and lowering, and 
thumping, and flattening, and molding it, to the ever- 
varying requisitions of his throbbing temples ! 

He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he 
lies full length, then half length, obliquely, transversely, 
head and feet quite across the bed ; and none accuses him 
of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is abso- 
lute. They are his Mare Clausum. 

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self 
to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme 
selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. 'Tis 
the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to 
think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, 
or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, 
affects him not. 

A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the 
event of a lawsuit, which was to be the making or the 
marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudg- 
ing about upon this man's errand to fifty quarters of the 



63 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that soli- 
citor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is 
absolutely as indifferent to the decision as if it were 
a question to be tried at Pekin. Perad venture from 
some whispering, going on about the house, not intended 
for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him under- 
stand that things went cross-grained in the Court yester- 
day, and his friend is ruined. But the word " friend '* 
and the word " ruin " disturb him no more than so much 
jargon. He is not to think of anything but how to get 
better. 

What a world of foreign cares are merged in that 
absorbing consideration ! 

He has put on the strong armor of sickness, he is 
wrapped in the callous hide of suffering ; he keeps his 
sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock 
and key, for his own use only. 

He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to him- 
self ; he yearneth over himself ; his bowels are even 
melted within him, to think what he suffers ; he is not 
ashamed to weep over himself. 

He is for ever plotting how to do some good to 
himself; studying little stratagems and artificial alle- 
viations. 

He makes the most of himself ; dividing himself, by 
an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals as 
he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he 
meditates — as of a thing apart from him — ^upon his poor 
aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, 
lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable sub- 
stance of pain, not to be removed without opening the 
very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities 
his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He compassion- 



THE CONVALESCENT. 63 

ates himself all over ; and his bed is a very discipline of 
humanity and tender heart. 

He is his own sympathizer, and instinctively feels 
that none can so well perform that office for him. He 
cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punc- 
tual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces 
his broths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so 
unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish 
ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bedpost. 

To the world's business he is dead. He understands 
not what the callings and occupations of mortals are ; only 
he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when 
the doctor makes his daily call ; and even in the lines of 
that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but 
solely conceives of himself as the sieh man. To what 
other uneasy couch the good man is hastening when he 
slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so 
carefully, for fear of rustling, is no speculation which he 
can at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular 
return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to- 
morrow. 

Household rumors touch him not. Some faint mur- 
mur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes 
him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not 
to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants 
gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as 
upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as ho 
troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess 
at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burden 
to him ; he can just endure jAie pressure of conjecture. 
He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled 
knocker, and closes it again without asking " Who was 
it ? " He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries 



64 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

are making after him, but he cares not to know the name 
of the inquirer. In the general stillness and awful hush 
of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty. 

To he sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives. Com- 
pare the silent tread, and quiet ministry almost by the 
eye only, with which he is served, with the careless de- 
meanor, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping 
of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same atten- 
dants when he is getting a little better ; and you will 
confess that from the bed of sickness (throne let me 
rather call it) to the elbow-chair of convalescence is a 
fall from dignity amounting to a deposition. 

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pris- 
tine stature 1 Where is now the space which he occu- 
pied so lately in his own, in the family's eye ? The scene 
of his regalities, his sick-room, which was his presence- 
chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies — 
how is it reduced to a common bedroom ! The trimness 
of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning 
about it. It is made eYerj day. How unlike to that 
wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it pre- 
sented so short a time since, when to maJce it was a ser- 
vice not to be thought of at oftener than three- or four- 
day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and 
grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to 
the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decen- 
cies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be 
lifted into it again, for another three or four days' res- 
pite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh 
furrow was an historical record of some shifting posture, 
some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease ; and 
the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the 
crumpled coverlid. 



THE CONVALESCENT. 65 

Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans so 
much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns 
of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean 
pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved ; 
and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. 

Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of great- 
ness survives in the still lingering visitations of the med- 
ical attendant. But how is he, too, changed with every- 
thing else ! Can this be he — this man of news, of chat, 
of anecdote, of everything but physic — can this be he, 
who so lately came between the patient and his cruel 
enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erect- 
ing herself into a high mediating party ? Pshaw ! 'tis 
some old woman. 

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — 
the spell that hushed the household — the desert-like 
stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers — the mute 
attendance — the inquiry by looks — the still softer deli- 
cacies of self-attention — the sole and single eye of dis- 
temper alonely fixed upon itself — world-thoughts excluded 
— the man a world unto himseK — ^his own theatre — 

What a speck is he dwindled into ! 

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb 
of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of estab- 
lished health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, re- 
questing — an article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I ; but 
it is something hard — and the quibble, wretched as it 
was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it 
appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty busi- 
nesses of life, which I had lost sight of ; a gentle call to 
activity, however trivial ; a wholesome weaning from 
that preposterous dream of self-absorption — the puffy 
5 



66 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

state of sickness — ^in whicli I confess to have lain' so 
long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies of the 
world alike ; to its laws, and to its literature. The 
hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres which in 
imagination I had spread over — for the sick man swells 
in the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he 
becomes a Tityus to himself — are wasting to a span ; and 
for the giant of self-importance which I was so lately, 
you have me once again in my natural pretensions — ^the 
lean and meager figure of your insignificant Monthly 
Contributor. 



CAPTAIN" JACKSON. 

Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I 
observe with concern " At his cottage on the Bath road. 
Captain Jackson." The name and attribution are com- 
mon enough ; but a feeling like reproach persuades me 
that this could have been no other in fact than my dear 
old friend, who some five and twenty years ago rented 
a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the 
appellation here used, about a mile from Westbourne 
Green. Alack, how good men, and the good turns they 
do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the 
surprise of some such sad memento as that which now 
lies before me ! 

He whom I mean was a retired half -pay officer, with 
a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he main- 
tained with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon 
that slender professional allowance. Comely girls they 
were, too. 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 67 

And was I in danger of forgetting this man? — Lis 
cheerful suppers — the noble tone of hospitality, when 
first you set your foot in the cottage — the anxious minis- 
terings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) 
was to be ministered — Amalthea's horn in a poor plat- 
ter — the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his 
magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiphed his 
means to bounties. 

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed 
a bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — 
remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the 
door contented. But in the copious will, the reveling 
imagination of your host — the " mind, the mind. Master 
Shallow" — whole beeves were spread, before you — heca- 
tombs — no end appeared to the profusion. 

It was the widow's cruse — the loaves and fishes; 
carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it ; the 
stamina were left; the elemental bone still flourished, 
divested of its accidents. 

" Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the 
open-handed creature exclaim ; " While we have, let us 
not want " ; " Here is plenty left " ; " Want for nothing " 
— with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of 
appetite, and old. concomitants of smoking boards and 
feast-oppressed chargers. Then, sliding a slender ratio 
of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate or the daugh- 
ters', he would, convey the remnant rind into his own, 
with a merry quirk of "nearer the bone," etc., an(J*de- 
claring that he universally preferred the outside. For 
we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and 
some of us in a manner sat above the salt. None but 
his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at 
night ; the fragments were vei'^ Tiospitibus sacra. But of 



68 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

one thing or another there was always enough, and leav- 
ings ; only he would sometimes finish the remainder 
crust, to show that he wished no savings. 

Wine we had none, nor, except on very rare occa- 
sions, spirits; but the sensation of wine was there. Some 
thin kind of ale I remember — "British beverage," he 
would say ! " Push about, my boys " ; " Drink to your 
sweethearts, girls." At every meager draught a toast 
must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor 
were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut 
your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of 
punch was foaming in the center, with beams of gener- 
ous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the 
table corners. You got flustered, without knowing 
whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the po- 
tency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements. 

We had our songs — " Why, Soldiers, why," and the 
"British Grenadiers" — in which last we were all obliged 
to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their pro- 
ficiency was a nightly theme — the masters he had given 
them — the " no-expense " which he spared to accom- 
plish them in a science " so necessary to young women." 
But then — they could not sing " without the instru- 
ment." 

Sacred, and by me never-to-be-violated. Secrets of 
Poverty ! Should I disclose your honest aims at gran- 
deur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? Sleep, 
slee^, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be 
extant ; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs ; 
dear, cracked spinet of dearer Louisa! Without men- 
tion of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her 
thinner warble! A veil be spread over the dear de- 
lighted face of the well-deluded father, who now, haply 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 69 

listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure 
than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords re- 
sponsive of the twitterings of that slender image of a 
voice. 

We were not without our literary talk either. It did 
not extend far, but as far as it went, it was good. It 
was bottomed well ; had good grounds to go upon. In 
the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to 
have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional 
retirements, had penned the greater part of his " Leoni- 
das." This circumstance was nightly quoted, though 
none of the present inmates, that I could discover, ap- 
peared ever to have met with the poem in question. 
But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and 
the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family 
importance. It diffused a learned air through the apart- 
ment, the little side casement of which (the poet's study 
window), opening upon a superb view as far as the 
pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial 
acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof our host could 
call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate ex- 
pansion of — vanity shall I call it ? — in his bosom, as he 
showed them in a glowing summer evening. It was all 
his, he took it all in, and communicated rich portions of 
it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospi- 
tality ; it was going over his grounds ; he was lord for 
the time of showing them, and you the implicit lookers- 
up to his magnificence. 

He was a juggler, who threw mists before your 
eyes ; you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would 
say, "Hand me the 8iher sugar tongs" ; and before you 
could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated^ he 
would disturb and captivate your imagination by a mis- 



70 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

nomer of "the urn" for a teakettle, or by calling a 
homely bench a sofa. Eich men direct you to their fur- 
niture, poor ones divert you from it ; he neither did one 
nor the other, but by simply assuming that everything 
was handsome about him, you were positively at a de- 
mur what you did or did not see at the cottage. With 
nothing to live on, he seemed to live on everything. He 
had a stock of wealth in his mind ; not that which is 
properly termed Content^ for in truth he was not to be 
contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force 
of a magnificent self-delusion. 

Enthusiasm is catching ; and even his wife, a sober 
native of l!^orth Britain, who generally saw things more 
as they were, was not proof against the continual colli- 
sion of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and 
discreet young women ; in the main, perhaps, not insen- 
sible to their true circumstances. I have seen them as- 
sume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the pre- 
ponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, 
not for any half hour together did they ever look their 
own prospects fairly in the face. There was no resisting 
the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination 
conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, 
which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and 
seem at last to have realized themselves ; for they 
both have married since, I am told, more than respect- 
ably. 

It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some 
subjects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the 
manner in which the pleasant creature described the cir- 
cumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remem- 
ber something of a chaise and four, in which he made 
his entry into Glasgow on that morning to fetch the 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 71 

bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so 
completely made out the stanza of the old ballad — 

When we came down through Glasgow town, 

We were a comely sight to see ; 
My love was clad in black velvet, 

And I myself in cramasie. 

I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his 
own actual splendor at all corresponded with the world's 
notions on that subject. In homely cart or traveling 
caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they chanced to 
be transported in less prosperous days, the ride through 
Glasgow came back upon his fancy, not as a humiliating 
contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one 
day's state. It seemed an "equipage etern" from which 
no power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had power 
thereafter to dislodge him. 

There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon 
indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away 
the sense of them before strangers may not be always 
discommendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when de- 
tected, have more of our admiration than contempt. 
But for a man to put the cheat upon himself— to play 
the Bobadil at home, and, steeped in poverty up to the 
lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches- 
is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery 
over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Cap- 
tain Jackson. 



72 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 



THE SUPEKANNUATED MAK 

Sera tamen respexit 
Libertas. Virgil. 

A clerk I was in London gay. 

O'Keefe. 

If peradventure, reader, it has been thy lot to waste 
the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the 
irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison 
days prolonged through middle age down to decrepi- 
tude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite ; 
to have lived to forget that there are such things as holi- 
days, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of 
childhood ; then, and then only, will you be able to ap- 
preciate my deliverance. 

It is now six-and- thirty years since I took my seat 
at the desk in Mincing Lane. Melancholy was the tran- 
sition at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the 
frequently intervening vacations of schooldays, to the 
eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours a day attendance 
at the counting-house. But time partially reconciles us 
to anything. I gradually became content — doggedly con- 
tented, as wild animals in cages. 

It is true I had my Sundays to myself ; but Sundays, 
admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of 
worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted 
for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, 
there is a gloom for me attendant upon a City Sunday, a 
weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, 
the music and the ballad-singers — the buzz and stirring 
murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 73 

The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glit- 
tering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, 
and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which 
make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of 
the metropolis so delightful, are shut out. No bookstalls 
deliciously to idle over ; no busy faces to recreate the 
idle man who contemplates them ever passing by ; the 
very place of business a charm by contrast to his tem- 
porary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but un- 
happy countenances — or half-happy at best — of emanci- 
pated 'prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and 
there a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, who, 
slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the 
capacity of enjoying a free hour, and livelily expressing 
the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very stroll- 
ers in the fields on that day look anything but comfort- 
able. 

But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day 
at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and 
air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This 
last was a great indulgence, and the prospect of its recur- 
rence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and 
made my durance tolerable. But when the week came 
round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep 
touch with me ? or rather, was it not a series of seven 
uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a 
wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of 
them ? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest ? 
Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the 
desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks 
that must intervene before such another snatch would 
come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something 
of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. 



74 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained 
my thralldom. 

Independently of the rigors of attendance, I have 
ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) 
of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, 
had increased to such a degree that it was visible in all 
the lines of my countenance. My health and my good 
spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, 
to which I should be found unequal. Besides my day- 
light servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, 
and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, 
errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of 
age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I 
had grown to my desk, as it were ;• and the wood had 
entered into my soul. 

My fellows in the ofiBce would sometimes rally me 
upon the trouble legible in my countenance ; but I did 
not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of my 
employers, when, on the 5th of last month, a day ever to 

be remembered by me, L , the junior partner in the 

firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with my 
bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of them. So 
• taxed, I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and 
added that I was afraid I should eventually be obliged to 
resign his service. He spoke some words of course to 
hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole week 
I remained laboring under the impression that I had 
acted imprudently in my disclosure ; that I had fooUshly 
given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating 
my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the 
most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, 
when, on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was 
about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 75 

eight o'clock), I received an awful summons to attend 
the presence of the whole assembled firm in the formi- 
dable back parlor. I thought, Now my time is surely 
come ; I have done for myself ; I am going to be told 

that they have no longer occasion for me. L , I 

could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a 

little relief to me, when to my utter astonishment B , 

the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the 
length of my services, my very meritorious conduct dur- 
ing the whole of the time. (The deuce, thought I, how 
did he find out that ? I profess I never had the confi- 
dence to think as much.) He went on to descant on the 
expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my 
heart panted !), and, asking me a few questions as to the 
amount of my own property, of which I have a little, 
ended with a proposal, to which his three partners 
nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the 
house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to 
the amount of two thirds of my accustomed salary — a 
magnificent offer ! I do not know what I answered be- 
tween surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that 
I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free 
from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out 
a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home 
— for ever. This noble benefit — gratitude forbids me to 
conceal their names — I owe to the kindness of the most 
munificent firm in the world — the house of Boldero, 
Merryweather, Bosanquet & Lacy. 

Esto perpetua / 

For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. 
I could only apprehend my felicity ; I was too confused 
to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was 



76 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the con- 
dition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose 
after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust 
myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time 
into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to 
have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I 
had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. 
From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted 
up into a vast revenue ; I could see no end of my posses- 
sions; I wanted some steward, or judicious hailifP, to 
manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me 
caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, 
nor without weighing their own resources, to forego 
their customary employment all at once, for there may 
be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my 
resources are sufficient ; and now that those first giddy 
raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of 
the blessedness of my condition. I am in no hurry. 
Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If 
Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it away ; but I 
do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old 
transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most 
of them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it 
away ; but I do not read in that violent measure with 
which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I 
used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone win- 
ters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now), just when the 
fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure : I let it 
come to me. I am like the man 

.... that's bom, and has his years come to him 
In some green desert. 

" Years ! " you will say ; " what is this superan- 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 77 

nuated simpleton calculating upon ? He has already told 
us he is past fifty." 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct 
out of them the hours which I have lived to other peo- 
ple, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young 
fellow. For that is the only true Time which a man can 
properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; 
the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, 
is other people's Time, not his. The remnant of my poor 
days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three- 
fold. My tea next years, if I stretch so far, will be as 
long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair rule-of- three sum. 

Among the strange phantasies which beset me at the 
commencement of my freedom, and of which aU traces 
are not yet gone, one was that a vast tract of Time had 
intervened since I quitted the Oounting-House. I could 
not conceive of it as an affair of yesterday. The part- 
ners, and the clerks with whom I had for so many years, 
and for so many hours in each day of the year, been 
closely associated — being suddenly removed from them 
— they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage, 
which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy 
by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friend's death : 

.... 'Twas but just now he went away ; 
I have not since had time to shed a tear ; 
And yet the distance does the same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me. " 
Time takes no measure in Eternity. 

To dissipate this awkward feeling I have been fain 
to go among them once or twice since ; to visit my old 
desk-fellows — my co-brethren of the quill — that I had 
left below in the state militant. Not all the kindness 



78 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

with, which they received me could quite restore to me 
that pleasant familiarity which I had heretofore enjoyed 
among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but 
methought they went off but faintly. My old desk, the 
peg where I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. 
I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. D — ^1 
take me if I did not feel some remorse — ^beast if I had 
not — at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners 
of my toils for six-and-thirty years, that smoothed for 
me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of 
my professional road. Had it been so rugged, then, after 
all ? or was I a coward simply ? "Well, it is too late to 
repent ; and I also know that these suggestions are a 
common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my 
heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands be- 
twixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall be some 
time before I get quite reconciled to the separation. 
Farewell, old cronies ; yet not for long, for again and 
again I will come among ye, if I shall have your leave. 

Farewell, Oh , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! Do , 

mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! PI , oflBcious 

to do, and to volunteer, good services ! And thou, thou 
dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington 
of old, stately house of Merchants ; with thy labyrinthine 
passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where can- 
dles for one half the year supplied the place of the sun's 
light ; unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern fosterer 
of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, and not in the 
obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, my 
" works " ! There let them rest, as I do from my labors, 
piled on thy massive shelves, more MSS. in folio than 
ever Aquinas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I be- 
queath among ye. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 79 

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first 
communication. At that period I was approaching to 
tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm 
indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the 
first flutter was left ; an unsettling sense of novelty ; the 
dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed 
my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some neces- 
sary part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from 
strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution re- 
turned upon the world. I am now as if I had never 
been other than my own master. It is natural for me 
to go where I please, to do what I please. I find myself 
at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond Street, and it seems 
to me that I have been sauntering there at that very 
hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a 
bookstall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. 
There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself 
before a fine picture in the morning. Was it ever other- 
wise ? What is become of Fish Street Hill ? Where is 
Fenchurch Street ? Stones of old Mincing Lane, which 
I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six-and-thirty 
years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are your 
everlasting flints now vocal ? I indent the gayer flags of 
Pall Mall. It is 'Change time, and I am strangely among 
the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ven- 
tured to compare the change in my condition to a pass- 
ing into another world. Time stands still in a manner 
to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not 
know the day of the week or of the month. Each day 
used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the 
foreign post-days ; in its distance from, or propinquity 
to, the next Sunday. I had ray Wednesday feelings, my 
Saturday night's sensations. The genius of each day 



80 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting 
my appetite, spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, 
with the dreary five to follow, sat as a load upon my 
poor Sabbath recreations. What charm has washed that 
^thiop white ? What is gone of Black Monday ? All 
days are the same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate fail- 
ure of a holiday, as it too often proved, what with my 
sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest 
quantity of pleasure out of it— is melted down into a 
week-day. I can spare to go to church now, without 
grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut 
out of the holiday. I have Time for everything. I can 
visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much 
occupation when he is busiest. I can insult over him 
with an invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to 
Windsor this fine May morning. It is Lucretian pleasure 
to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in 
the world, carking and caring ; like horses in a mill, 
drudging on in the same eternal round. And what is it 
all for ? A man can never have too much Time to him- 
self, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would 
christen him Nothing-to-do ; he should do nothing. 
Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he 
is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. 
Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those 
accursed cotton mills ? Take me that lumber of a desk 
there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends. 

I am no longer . . . ., clerk to the Firm of, etc. I 
am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gar- 
dens. I am already come to be known by my vacant 
face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, 



BARBARA S . 81 

nor with any settled purpose. I walk about, not to and 
from. They tell me a certain cum dignitate air, that has 
been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun 
to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility per- 
ceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the 
state of the opera. Opus operatum est. I have done all 
that I came into this world to do. I have worked task- 
work, and have the rest of the day to myself. 



BARBAEA 8- 



On- the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or *4, 
I forget which it was, just as the clock had struck one, 
Barbara S , with her accustomed punctuality, as- 
cended the long rambling staircase, with awkward inter- 
posed landing-places, which led to the office, or rather a 
sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then Trea- 
surer of (what few of our readers may remember) the 
old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, 
and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to 
receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was 
not much that Barbara had to claim. 

This little maid had Just entered her eleventh year ; 
but her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to 
her, with the benefits which she felt to accrue from her 
pious application of her small earnings, had given an air 
of womanhood to her steps and to her behavior. You 
would have taken her to have been at least five years 
older. 

Till latterly she had merely been employed in cho- 
6 



82 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

ruses, or where children were wanted to fill up the 
scene. But the manager, observing a diligence and 
adroitness in her aboye her age, had for some few months 
past intrusted to her the performance of whole parts. 
You may guess the self-consequence of the promoted 
Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Ar- 
thur ; had rallied Eichard with infantine petulance in 
the Duke of York ; and in her turn had rebuked that 
petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would 
have done the elder child in Morton's pathetic afterpiece 
to the life ; but as yet " The Children in the Woods " 
was not. 

Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, 
I have seen some of these small parts, each making two 
or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of 
the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little 
more carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies 
of the establishment. But such as they were, blotted 
and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kept them all ; and 
in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightful 
sight to behold them bound up in costliest morocco, each 
single, each small part making a loolc — with fine clasps, 
gilt-splashed, etc. She had conscientiously kept them as 
they had been delivered to her ; not a blot had been 
effaced or tampered with. They were precious to her 
for their affecting remembrancings. They were her 
principia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; the lit- 
tle steps by which she pressed forward to perfection. 
"What," she would say, "could India-rubber, or a pum- 
ice-stone, have done for these darlings? " 

I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed, I have 
little or none to tell — so I will just mention an observa- 
tion of hers connected with that interesting time. 



BARBARA S . 83 

Not long before she died I had been discoursing with 
her on the quantity of real present emotion which a great 
tragic performer experiences during acting. I ventured 
to think that, though in the first instance such players 
must have possessed the feelings which they so power- 
fully called up in others, yet by fi'equent repetition those 
feelings must become deadened in great measure, and 
the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, 
rather than express a present one. She indignantly re- 
pelled the notion that, with a truly great tragedian, tlio 
operation by which such effects were produced upon an 
audience could ever degrade itself into what was purely 
mechanical. "With much delicacy, avoiding to instance 
in her s6Z/*-experience, she told me that so long ago as 
when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. 
Porter's Isabella (I think it was), when that impressive 
actress had been bending over her in some heart-rending 
colloquy, she had felt real hot tears come trickling from 
her, which (to use her powerful expression) have per- 
fectly scalded her back. 

I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter, but it 
was some great actress of that day. The name is indif- 
ferent ; but the fact of the scalding tears I most distinct- 
ly remember. 

I was always fond of the society of players, and am 
not sure that an impediment in my speech (which cer- 
tainly kept me out of the pulpit), even more than certain 
personal disqualifications which are often got over in 
that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life 
from adopting it. I have had the honor (I must ever 
%all it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of 
Miss Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. 
Liston. I have chatted with ever good-humored Mrs. 



84 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Charles Kemble. I have conversed as friend to friend 
with her accomplished husband. I have been indulged 
with a classical conference with Macready ; and with a 
sight of the Player-picture gallery at Mr. Mathews's, 
when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of 
the old actors (whom he loves so much), went over it 
with me, supplying to his capital collection what alone the 
artist could not give them — voice, and their living mo- 
tion. Old tones, half faded, of Dodd, and Parsons, and 
Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bidding. Only 
Edwin he could not restore to me. I have supped with 
— but I am growing a coxcomb. 

As I was about to say — at the desk of the then trea- 
surer of the old Bath Theatre (not Diamond's) presented 
herself the little Barbara S . 

The parents of Barbara had been in reputable cir- 
cumstances. The father had practiced, I believe, as an 
apothecary in the town. But his practice, from causes 
which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to 
arraign — or perhaps from that pure infelicity which ac- 
companies some people in their walk through life, and 
which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence 
— was now reduced to nothing. They were, in fact, in 
the very teeth of starvation, when the manager, who 
knew and respected them in better days, took the little 
Barbara into his company. 

At the period I commenced with, her slender earn- 
ings were the sole support of the family, including two 
younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some morti- 
fying circumstances. Enough to say that her Saturday's 
pittance was the only chance of a Sunday's (generallj^ 
their only) meal of meat. 

One thing I will only mention, that in some child's 



BARBARA S . 85 

part, where in lier theatrical character she was to sup 
off a roast fowl (O joy to Barbara !), some comic actor, 
who was for the night caterer for this stage dainty, in 
the misguided humor of his part, threw over the dish 
such a quantity of salt (O grief and pain of heart to Bar- 
bara !) that when she crammed a portion of it into her 
mouth she was obliged sputteringly to reject it ; and 
what with shame of her ill- acted part, and pain of real 
appetite at missing such a dainty, her little heart sobbed 
almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well- 
fed spectators were totally unable to comprehend, mer- 
cifully relieved her.* 

This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who 
stood before old Eavenscroft, the treasurer, for her Sat- 
urday's payment. 

Eavenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theat- 
rical people besides herself say, of all men least calcu- 
lated for a treasurer. He had no head for accounts, 
paid away at random, kept scarce any books, and, sum- 
ming up at the week's end, if he found himself a pound 
or so deficient, blest himself that it was no worse. 

Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half guinea. 
By mistake he popped into her hand a whole one. 

Barbara tripped away. 

She was entirely unconscious at first of the mis- 
take ; God knows, Eavenscroft would never have dis- 
covered it. 

But when she had got down to the first of those un- 
couth landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual 
weight of metal pressing her little hand. 

Now mark the dilemma. 

She was by nature a good child. From her parents 
and those about her she had imbibed no contrary influ- 



86 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

ence. But then they had taught her nothing. Poor 
men's smoky cabins are not always porticoes of moral 
philosophy. This little maid had no instinct to evil, but 
then she might be said to have no fixed principle. She 
had heard honesty commended, but never dreamed of 
its application to herself. She thought of it as some- 
thing which concerned grown-up people — men and wo- 
men. She had never known temptation, or thought of 
preparing resistance against it. 

Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, 
and explain to him his blunder. He was already so con- 
fused, with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, 
that she would have had some difficulty in making him 
understand it. She saw that in an instant. And then it 
was such a bit of money! and then the image of a larger 
allowance of butcher's meat on their table next day came 
across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth 
moistened. But then Mr. Eavenscroft had always been 
so good-natured, had stood her friend behind the scenes, 
and even recommended her promotion to some of her 
little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be 
worth a world of money. He was supposed to have 
fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came 
staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and 
shoeless sisters. And then she looked at her own neat 
white cotton stockings, which her situation at the thea- 
tre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide 
for her, with hard straining and pinching from the fami- 
ly stock, and thought how glad she should be to cover 
their poor feet with the same, and how then they could 
accompany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto 
been precluded from doing by reason of their unfashion- 
able attire. In these thoughts she reached the second 



BARBARA S . 87 

landing-place — the second, I mean, fi*om the top — for 
there was still another left to traverse. 

Now virtue support Barbara ! 

And that never-failing friend did step in ; for at that 
moment a strength not her own, I have heard her saj, 
was revealed to her — a reason above reasoning — and 
without her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt 
her feet to move), she found herself transported back to 
the individual desk she had just quitted, and her hand 
in the old hand of Eavenscroft, who in silence took back 
the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good 
man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her 
were anxious ages, and from that moment a deep peace 
fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of hon- 
esty. 

A year or two's unrepining application to her profes- 
sion brightened up the feet and the prospects of her lit- 
tle sisters, set the whole family upon their legs again, 
and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral 
dogmas upon a landing-place. 

I have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much 
short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with 
which the old man pocketed the difterence, which had 
caused her such mortal throes. 

This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from 
the mouth of the late Mrs, Crawford,* then sixty-seven 
years of age (she died soon after) ; and to her struggles 
upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured 
to think her indebted for that power of rending the 

* The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she 
changed by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, 
and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, a third time a widow, 
when I knew her. 



88 THE LAST ESSAYS OP ELIA. 

heart in the representation of conflicting emotions, for 
which in after-years she was considered as little inferior 
(if at all so in the part of Lady Kandolph) even to Mrs. 
Siddons. 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 

IN A LETTEE TO E S , ESQ. 

Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of 
discipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to 
that church which you have so worthily historijied, yet 
may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled 
heart or a portion of irreverent sentiment I shall enter 
her heautiful and time-hallowed edifices. Judge then 
of my mortification when, after attending the choral 
anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being 
desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, 
with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself 
excluded — turned out like a dog, or some profane person, 
into the common street, with feelings not very conge- 
nial to the place, or to the solemn service which I had 
been listening to. It was a jar after that music. 

You had your education at Westminster ; and doubt- 
less among those dim aisles and cloisters you must have 
gathered much of that devotional feeling in those young 
years, on which your purest mind feeds still — and may 
it feed ! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and 
gracefully blending ever with the religious, may have 
been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mor- 
tality. You owe it to the place of your education, you 
owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 89 

your ancestors, you owe it to the venerableness of your 
ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and 
called in question through these practices, to speak aloud 
your sense of them ; never to desist raising your voice 
against them till they be totally done away with and 
abolished ; till the doors of "Westminster Abbey be no 
longer closed against the decent, though low-in-purse, 
enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an 
injury against his family economy if he would be indulged 
with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to 
the decencies which you wish to see maintained in its 
impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an 
object of inspection to the poor at those times only in 
which they must rob from their attendance on the wor- 
ship every minute which they can bestow upon the 
fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this 
subject ; in vain such poor nameless writers as myself 
express their indignation. A word from you, sir — a 
hint in your Journal — would be suflScient to fling open 
the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can re- 
member them when we were boys. At that time of 
life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in 
both of us have suffered, if the entrance to so much 
reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much 
silver ! If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional 
admission (as we certainly should have done), would the 
sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us 
(while we have been weighing anxiously prudence against 
sentiment) as when the gates stood open as those of the 
adjacent Park ; when we could walk in at any time, as 
the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as 
that lasted ? Is the being shown over a place the same 
as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it ? 



90 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person 
find entrance (out of service time) under the sum of 
tioo shillings. The ricb and the great will smile at the 
anti-climax presumed to lie in these two short words. 
But you can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how 
much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much taste 
and genius may coexist, especially in youth, with a 
purse incompetent to this demand. A respected friend 
of ours, during his late visit to the metropolis, presented 
himself for admission to St. Paul's, At the same time a 
decently clothed man, with as decent a wife and child, 
were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price 
was only twopence each person. The poor but decent 
man hesitated, desirous to go in ; but there were three 
of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he 
wished to see the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the Inte- 
rior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state 
of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too 
much. Tell the Aristocracy of the country (no man can 
do it more impressively) ; instruct them of what value 
these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their 
sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these 
Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of 
your better nature with the pretext that an indiscrimi- 
nate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. 
Kemember your boy-days. Did you ever see or hear of 
a mob in the Abbey while it was free to all ? Do the 
rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such 
speculations ? It is aU that you can do to drive them 
into your churches ; they do not voluntarily offer them- 
selves. They have, alas ! no passion for antiquities ; for 
tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they 
would be no longer the rabble. 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 91 

For forty years that I liave known the fabric, tlie 
only well-attested charge of violation adduced has been 
a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the effigy 
of that amiable spy, Major Andre. And is it for this — 
the wanton mischief of some schoolboy, fired perhaps 
with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom — or the re- 
mote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so 
easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within 
the walls, if the vergers are incompetent for the duty — 
is it upon such wretched pretenses that the people of 
England are made to pay a new Peter's Pence so long 
abrogated, or must content themselves with contemplat- 
ing the ragged exterior of their Cathedral ? The mis- 
chief was done about the time that you were a scholar 
there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate 
relic ? 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 



Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? 

I DO not know when I have experienced a stranger 
sensation than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had 
been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays back, at 
my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of 
turning down the right-hand path by which he had en- 
tered, with staff in hand, and at noonday, deliberately 
march right forward into the midst of the stream that 
runs by us, and totally disappear. 

A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appall- 
ing enough ; but in the broad open daylight, to witness 



92 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

sucli an unreserved motion toward self-destruction in a 
valued friend, took from me all power of speculation. 

How I found my feet I know not. Consciousness 
was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me 
to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery appa- 
rition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff 
(the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upward, as 
feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that 
time) he was on my shoulders, and I — freighted with a 
load more precious than his who bore Anchises. 

And here I can not but do justice to the officious zeal 
of sundry passers-by, who, albeit arriving a little too 
late to participate in the honors of the rescue, in phil- 
anthropic shoals came thronging to communicate their 
advice as to the recovery ; prescribing variously the ap- 
plication, or non-application, of salt, etc., to the person of 
the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst 
the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more saga- 
cious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed send- 
ing for the Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and impos- 
sible, as one should think, to be missed on— shall I con- 
fess ? — in this emergency it was to me as if an Angel 
had spoken. Great previous exertions — and mine had 
not been inconsiderable — are commonly followed by a 
debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. 

MoNOOULUs — for so, in default of catching his true 
name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who 
now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged person, who, 
without having studied at the college, or truckled to the 
pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of 
his valuable time in experimental processes upon the 
bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital 
spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct and 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 93 

lost for ever. He omitted no occasion of obtruding his 
services, from a case of common surfeit suffocation to 
the ignobler obstructions sometimes induced by a too 
willM application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But 
though he declineth not altogether these drier extinc- 
tions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to water- 
practice ; for the convenience of which he hath judi- 
ciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the 
stream mentioned, where day and night, from his little 
watch-tower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth to 
detect the wrecks of drowned mortality — partly, as he 
saith, to be upon the spot, and partly because the liquids 
which he useth to prescribe to himself, and his patients, 
on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more con- 
veniently to be found at these common hostelries than in 
the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath 
arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he 
can distinguish a plunge at a half furlong distance, and 
can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a 
medal, suspended over a suit originally of a sad brown, 
but which, by time and frequency of nightly divings, has 
been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth 
by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting 
his left eye. His remedy — after a sufficient application 
of warm blankets, friction, etc. — is a simple tumbler or 
more of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as 
the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in 
the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he conde- 
scendeth to be the taster ; and showeth, by his own 
example, the innocuous nature of the prescription. No- 
thing can be more kind or encouraging than this proce- 
dure. It addeth confidence to the patient to see his med- 
ical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. 



94 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, what 
peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion ? 
In fine, Monooultjs is a humane, sensible man, who, for 
slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content 
to wear it out in the endeavor to save the lives of others 
— his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I 
could press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring 
the existence of such an invaluable creature to society 
as G. D. 

It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding 
alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed 
to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after 
notice of all the providential deliverances he had expe- 
rienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sit- 
ting up in my couch — my couch which, naked and void 
of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it 
administered shall be honored witli costly valance, at 
some price, and henceforth to be a state-bed at Oole- 
brook — ^he discoursed of marvelous escapes — by careless- 
ness of nurses — by pails of gelid and kettles of the boil- 
ing element, in infancy — by orchard pranks, and snap- 
ping twigs in schoolboy frolics — by descent of tiles at 
Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke — by 
studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance — by want 
and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the 
learned. Anon he would burst out into little fragments 
of chanting — of songs long ago — ends of deliverance 
hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but 
coming up now, when his heart was made tender as a 
child's ; for the tremor cordis^ in the retrospect of a 
recent dehverance, as in a case of impending danger, 
acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-ten- 
derness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice ; 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 95 

and Shakespeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good 
Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to 
mutter of shallow rivers. 

Waters of Sir Hugh Myddelton, what a spark you 
were like to have extinguished for ever ! Your salu- 
brious streams to this City, for now near two centuries, 
would hardly have atoned for what you were in a mo- 
ment washing away. Mockery of a river — liquid arti- 
fice, wretched conduit ! henceforth rank with canals and 
sluggish aqueducts. "Was it for this that, smit in boy- 
hood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveler, 
I paced the rales of Amwell to explore your tributary 
springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through 
green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? Ye 
have no swans, no Naiads, no Eiver God ; or did the 
benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck 
him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of 
your waters ? 

Had he been drowned in 0am there would have been 
some consonancy in it ; but what willows had ye to wave 
and rustle over his moist sepulture ? or, having no name^ 
besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did 
ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth 
to be termed the Stream Dyerian ? 

And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave ? 

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — 
no, not by daylight — without a sufficient pair of specta- 
cles — in your musing moods especially. Your absence of 
mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to 
be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering 
into Euripus with Aristotle if we can help it. Fie, man, 



96 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in 
favor of sprinkling only ! 

I have nothing but water in my head o' nights since 
this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence 
in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning 
to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful 
(that is, to me), " I sink in deep waters ; the billows go 
over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then 
I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. 
I cry out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful 
procession — suicidal faces, saved against their will from 
drowning ; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant grate- 
fulness, with ropy weeds pendent from locks of watchet 
hue — constrained Lazari — Pluto's half-subjects — stolen 
fees from the grave — bilking Charon of his fare. At 
their head Arion — or is it G. D. ? — ^in his singing gar- 
ments march eth singly, with harp in hand, and votive 
garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth 
straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of 
Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the 
half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown down- 
right, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy 
death. 

And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible 
world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so 
lately) to their inexorable precincts. "When a soul knocks 
once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused with- 
in the place must be considerable ; and the grim Feature, 
by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must 
have learned by this time to pity Tantalus. 

A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Ely- 
sian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced 
by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Aspho- 



KUQJE CRITICiE. 97 

del arose the gentler and the graver ghosts — poet, or 
historian — of Grecian or of Roman lore — to crown with 
unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labors of their 
unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected ; him Tyr- 
whitt hoped to encounter ; him the sweet lyrist of Peter 
House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with new- 
est airs prepared to greet; and, patron of the gentle 
Christ's boy — who should have been his patron through 
life — the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned 
foremost from his venerable ^sculapian chair, to wel- 
come into that happy country the matured virtues of the 
man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon the 
earth had so prophetically fed and watered. 



NUG^ CRITICS. 

DEFENSE OF THE SONNETS OF SIB PHILIP SYDNEY. 

Sydney's Sonnets — I speak of the best of them — are 
among the very best of their sort. They fall below the 
plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest 
spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of 
a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, cen- 
suring the " Arcadia," says of that work (to which they 
are a sort of after-tune or application), " vain and ama- 
torious enough, yet the things in their kind (as he con- 
fesses to be true of the romance) may be full of worth 
and wit." They savor of the Courtier, it must be al- 
lowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton 
was a Courtier when he wrote the " Masque " at Ludlow 

* GRAitrM tantiim vidU. 

7 



98 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the 
" Arcades." When the national struggle was to begin, 
he becomingly cast these vanities behind him ; and if 
the order of time had thrown Sir Phihp upon the crisis 
which preceded the Eevolution, there is no reason why 
he should not have acted the same part in that emergency 
which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did 
not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter 
on the French match may testify he could speak his mind 
freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the 
scaffold. 

The sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Mil- 
ton were the compositions of his maturest years. Those 
of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written 
in the very heyday of his blood. They are stuck full 
of amorous fancies — far-fetched conceits, hefitting his 
occupation ; for True Love thinks no labor to send out 
Thoughts upon vast, and more than Indian voyages, to 
bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, 
spicery, to sacrifice in self-depreciating similitudes, as 
shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved. We must 
be Lovers — or at least the cooling touch of time, the 
circum prmcordia frigus^ must not have so damped our 
faculties as to take away our recollection that we were 
once so — before we can duly appreciate the glorious 
vanities and graceful hyperboles of the passion. The 
images which lie before our feet (though by some ac- 
counted the only natural) are least natural for the high 
Sydnean love to express its fancies by. They may serve 
for the loves of Catullus, or the dear Author of the 
*' Schoolmistress " ; for passions that creep and whine 
in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never 
loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses 



NUGiE CRITICS. 99 

{ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther 
side ; and that the poet came not much short of a reli- 
gious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophize a 
singing-girl : 

Angelus unicuique suus {sic credite genies) 

Ohtigit ceihereis ales ah ordinibus. 
Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major. 

Nam tua prcesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum ? 
Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia coeli. 

Per tua secreto gutlura serpit agens ; 
Serjnt agens, facilisque docet morialia corda 

Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. 
Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaque pusus, 
In te una loquitur, c^etera mutus habet. 

This is loving in a strange fashion ; and it requires 
some candor of construction (besides the slight darken- 
ing of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly ap- 
pearance of something very like blasphemy in the last 
two verses. I think the Lover would have been stag- 
gered if he had gone about to express the same thought 
in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. 
His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he 
takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with 
his mortal passions. 



With how sad steps, Moon, thoir climb'st the skies ; 

How silently, and with how wan a face ! 

What ! may it be, that even in heavenly place 

That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries ? 

Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes 

Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case ; 

I read it in thy looks ; thy languisht grace 



100 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. 

Then, even of fellowship, Moon, tell me, 

Is constant love deemed there but want of wit ? 

Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? 

Do they above love to be loved, and yet 

Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess ? 

Do they call virtue there — ungratefulness ? 

The last line of this poem is a little obscured by trans- 
position. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a 
virtue ? 

11. 

Come, Sleep, Sleep, the certain knot of peace, 
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, 
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 
The indifferent judge between the high and low ; 
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease * 
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; 

make in me those civil w^rs to cease ; 

1 will good tribute pay, if thou do so. 

Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 
A rosy garland, and a weary head. 
And if these things, as being thine by right, 
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, 
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. 

III. 

The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness 
Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes. 
Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise, 
With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. 
Some, that know how my spring I did address, 

* Press. 



NUG^ CRITICS. 101 

Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies ; 
Others, because the Prince my service tries, 
Think that I think state errors to redress ; 
But harder judges judge, ambition's rage, 
Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place, 
Holds my young brain captived in golden cage. 
fools, or otherwise ! alas, the race 
Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start, 
But only Stella's eyes, and Stella's heart. 

IV. 

Because I oft in dark abstracted guise 

Seem most alone in greatest company, 

With dearth of words or answers quite awry 

To them that would make speech of speech arise ; 

They deem, and of their doom the rumor flies, 

That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie 

So in my swelling breast, that only I 

Fawn on myself, and others do despise. 

Yet Fride, I think, doth not my soul possess, 

Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass ; 

But one worse fault — Amhition — I confess. 

That makes me oft my best friends overpass, 

Unseen, unheard — while Thought to highest place 

Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. 

V. 

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance, 
Guided so well that I obtained the prize. 
Both by the judgment of the English eyes. 
And of some sent from that sweet enemy^ France ; 
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance ; 
Townsfolk my strength ; a daintier judge applies 
His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise ; 



102 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Some lucky wits impute it but to chance ; 
Others, because of both sides I do take 
My blood from them, who did excel in this, 
Think Nature me a man of arms did make. 
How far they shot awry ! the true cause is, 
Stella looked on, and from her heavenly face 
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. 

VI. 

In martial sports I had my cunning tried, 
And yet to break more staves did me address, 
While with the people's shouts (I must confess) 
Youth, luck, and praise even filled my veins with pride- 
When Cupid having me (his slave) descried 
In Mars's livery, prancing in the press, 
" What now. Sir Fool ! " said he : "I would no less. 
Look here, I say," I look'd, and Stella spied, 
Who, hard by, made a window send forth light. 
My heart then quak'd, then dazzled were mine eyes ; 
One hand forgat to rule, th' other to fight ; 
Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries. 
My foe came on, and beat the air for me. 
Till that her blush made me my shame to see. 

VII. 

No more, my dear, no more these counsels try, 

give my passions leave to run their race ; 
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; 

Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry ; 
Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye ; 
Let me no steps, but of lost labor, trace ; 
Let all the earth with scorn recount my case. 
But do not will me from my love to fly. 

1 do not envy Aristotle's wit, 



NUG^ CRITICJS. 103 

Nor do aspire to Caesar's bleeding fame ; 
Nor aught do care, though some above me sit ; 
Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame, 
But that which once may win thy cruel heart. 
Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. 

VIII. 

Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is, 

School'd only by his mother's tender eye. 

What wonder, then, if he his lesson miss. 

When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? 

And yet my Star, because a sugar'd kiss 

In sport I suck'd, while she asleep did lie. 

Doth lour, nay, chide, nay, threat, for only this. 

Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble L 

But no 'sense serves ; she makes her wrath appear 

In beauty's throne : see, notv, who dares come near 

Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain ? 

heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face 
Anger invests with such a lovely grace. 
That Anger's self I needs must kiss again. 

IX. 

1 never drank of Aganippe well, 
Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit. 

And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell : 

Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites unfit. 

Some do I hear of Poet's fury tell, 

But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it ; 

And this I swear by blackest brook of hell, 

I am no pick-purse of another's wit. 

How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease 

My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow 

In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please ? 



104 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Guess me the cause. What, is it thus ? Fie, no. 
Or so ? Much less. How then ? Sure thus it is : 
My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss. 

X. 

Of all the kings that ever here did reign, 
Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name. 
Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain — 
Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame ; 
Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame 
His sire's revenge, joined with a kingdom's gain. 
And, gained by Mars, could yet mad Mars so tame, 
That Balance weigh'd what Sword did late obtain ; 
Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid. 
Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions' paws. 
That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid ; 
Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — 
But only, for this worthy knight durst prove 
To lose his crown rather than fail his love. 

XI. 

happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 

1 saw thyself, with many a smiling line 
Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear, 
While those fair planets on thy streams did shine ; 
The boat for joy could not to dance forbear. 
While wanton winds, with beauty so divine 
Ravish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair 

They did themselves (0 sweetest prison) twine. 
And fain those ^ol's youth there would their stay 
Have made ; but, forced by nature still to fly. 
First did with puffing kiss those locks display. 
She, so dishevel'd, blush'd ; from window I 
With sight thereof cried out, fair disgrace,. 
Let honor's self to thee grant highest place ! 



NUG^ CRITICS. 105 

XII. 

Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be, 

And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, 

Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, 

More soft than to a chamber melody — 

Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me 

To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet. 

My Muse and I must you of duty greet 

With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. 

Be you still fair, honor'd by public heed, 

By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot ; 

Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed ; 

And that you know I envy you no lot 

Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, 

Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss. 

Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last 
sonnet are my favorites. But the general beauty of 
them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. 
The spirit of " learning and of chivalry " — of which 
union Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the 
''president" — shines through them. I confess I can 
see nothing of the " jejune " or " frigid " in them — ^much 
less of the "stiff" and "cumbrous" — which I have 
sometimes heard objected to the " Arcadia." The verse 
runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned 
to the trumpet, or tempered (as himself expresses it) to 
" trampling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous 
phrases ; 

heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — 

Mghth Sonnet. 
.... sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 

A rosy garland, and a weary head. 

Second Sonnet. 



106 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

. . . that sweet enemy, France — 

Fifth Sonnet. 

But they are not rich in words only of vague and 
unlocalized feelings — the failing too much of some poe- 
try of the present day ; they are full, material, and cir- 
cumstantiated. Time and place appropriate every one 
of them. It is not a fever of passion wasting itself upon 
a thin diet of dainty words,* but a transcendent passion 
pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats 
of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judg- 
ment of them. An historical thread runs through them 
which almost afiSxes a date to them — marks the when and 
where they were written. 

* A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack 
of matter and circumstances, is, I think, one reason of the cold- 
ness with which the public has received the poetry of a noble- 
man now living, which, upon the score of exquisite diction alone, 
is entitled to something better than neglect. I venture to copy 
one of his sonnets in this place, which, for quiet sweetness and 
unaffected morality, has scarcely its parallel in oui* language. 

To A Bird that Haunted the Waters op Lacken in the 

Winter. 

By Lord Thurlow. 

me/ancholy bird, a winter's day 
Thou standest by the margin of the pool. 
And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school 
To patience, which all evil can allay. 
God has appointed thee the fish thy prey. 
And given thyself a lesson to the fool 
Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule. 
And his unthinking course by thee to weigh. 
There need not schools, nor a professor's chair, 
Though these be good, true wisdom to impart. 
He who has not enough, for these, to spare 
Of time or gold, may yet amend his heart. 
And teach his soul, by brooks and rivers fair : 
Nature is always wise in every part. 



NUG^ CRITIGJE. 107 

I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the 
merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by the 
wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) 
with which a favorite critic of our day takes every occa- 
sion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But 
the decisions of the author of " Table Talk," etc. (most 
profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, 
just), are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and 
authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has 
conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote 
sonnets, and was a king-hater; and it was congenial 
perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was 
unwilling to lose a Jine idea from my mind. The noble 
images, passions, sentiments, arid poetical delicacies of 
character, scattered all over the "Arcadia" (spite of 
some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me the 
character which his contemporaries have left us of the 
writer. I can not think, with Mr. Hazlitt, that Sir Philip 
Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish noble- 
man in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call 
to mind the epitaph made on him by Lord Brooke, to 
guide me to juster thoughts of him ; and I repose upon 
the beautiful lines in the •' Friend's Passion for his As- 
trophel," printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others: 

You knew — who knew not Astrophel ? 

(That I should live to say I knew, 

And have not in possession still !) — 

Things known permit me to renew. 
Of him, you know his merit such, 
I can not say — you hear — too much. 

Within these woods of Arcady 
He chief delight and pleasure took ; 



108 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

And on the mountain Partheny, 

Upon the crystal liquid brook, 
The Muses met him every day, 
That taught him sing, to write, and say. 

When he descended down the mount, 
His personage seemed most divine : 
A thousand graces one might count 
Fpon his lovely, cheerful eyne. 

To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, 

You were in paradise the while. 

A sweet attractive kind of grace ; 

A full assurance given hy looks ; 

Continual comfort in a face^ 

The lineaments of Gospel books — 
I trow that count'nance can not lie, 
Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. 

Above all others, this is he 
Which erst approved in his song 
That love and honor might agree, 
And that pure love will do no wrong. 

Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame 

To love a man of virtuous name. 

Did never love so sweetly breathe 

In any mortal breast before : 

Did never muse inspire beneath 

A poet's brain with finer store. 

He wrote of love with high conceit, 
And Beauty rear'd above her height. 

Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running 
into rage) in the poem — the last in the collection accom- 
panying the above — which from internal testimony I 
believe to be Lord Brooke's — beginning witb " Silence 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 109 

angmenteth grief," and then seriously ask himself wheth- 
er the subject of such absorbing and confounding regrets 
could have been that thing which Lord Oxford termed 
him. 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

Dan Sttjaet once told us that he did not remember 
that he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at 
Somerset House in his life. He might occasionally have 
escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going 
in ; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the 
oflfice of the "Morning Post" newspaper stood then just 
where it does now — we are carrying you back, reader, 
some thirty years or more — with its gilt- globe- topt front 
facing that emporium of our artists' grand Annual Ex- 
posure. We sometimes wish that we had observed the 
same abstinence with Daniel. 

A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us one 
of the finest-tempered of editors. Perry, of the "Morn- 
ing Chronicle," was equally pleasant, with a dash, no 
slight one either, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, 
and English all over. We have worked for both these 
gentlemen 

It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; 
to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river ; 

With holy reverence to approach the rocks, 
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. 

Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's 
exploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant 



110 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holiday 
(a " whole day's leave " we called it at Christ's Hospital) 
sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned 
either for such an undertaking, to trace the current of 
the New River — Myddeltonian stream ! — to its scaturient 
source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. 
Gallantly did we commence our solitary quest; for it 
was essential to the dignity of a Discovert that no eye 
of school-boy, save our own, should beam on the detec- 
tion. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes skirting Horn- 
sey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn — end- 
less, hopeless meanders, as it seemed, or as if the jealous 
waters had dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot 
of their nativity revealed — ^till, spent and nigh famished 
before set of the same sun, we sat down somewhere by 
Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, with a tithe of our pro- 
posed labors only yet accomplished, sorely convinced in 
spirit that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too ar- 
duous for our young shoulders. 

Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the 
traveler is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their 
shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader 
to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow 
flights in authorship, of some established name in litera- 
ture ; from the Gnat which preluded to the -^neid, to 
the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. 

In those days every morning paper, as an essential 
retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was 
bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. 
Sixpence a joke— and it was thought pretty high, too — 
was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases. The 
chat of the day, scandal, but, above all, dress^ furnished 
the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. HI 

seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be 
poignant. 

A fashion of flesh- or rather j9i?i^-colored hose for 
the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture when we 
were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to 

S 's paper, established our reputation in that line. 

We were pronounced a " capital hand." Oh the conceits 
which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! 
from the trite and obvious flower of Oytherea to the 
flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon 
" many waters." Then there was the collateral topic of 
ankles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like 
ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tum- 
bling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating some- 
thing "not quite proper" ; while, like a skillful posture- 
master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, 
he keeps the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation 
is destruction ; hovering in the confines of light and 
darkness, or where " both seem either " ; a hazy uncer- 
tain delicacy ; Autolycus-like in the play, still putting 
off his expectant auditory with "Whoop, do me no 
harm, good man ! " But, above all, that conceit arrided 
us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to 
remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astrsea — 
ultima Ccelestum terras relinquit — we pronounced, in 
reference to the stockings still, that Modesty taking 

HER FINAL LEAVE OF MOETALS, HER LAST BlUSH WAS VIS- 
IBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE HeAVENS BY THE TRACT OF 

THE GLOWING INSTEP. This might be called the crown- 
ing conceit, and was esteemed tolerable writing in those 
days. 

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes 
away ; as did the transient mode which had so favored 



112 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

us. The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began 
to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to 
stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none 
methought so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits 
and more than single meanings. 

Somebody has said that to swallow six cross-buns 
daily, consecutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the 
stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes 
daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelve- 
month, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder 
exaction. " Man goeth forth to his work until the even- 
ing " — from a reasonable hour in the morning, we pre- 
sume it was meant. Now, as our main occupation took 
us up from eight till five every day in the City, and as 
our evening hours, at that time of life, had generally to 
do with anything rather than business, it follows that 
the only time we could spare for this manufactory of 
jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in 
every want beyond mere bread and cheese — was exact- 
ly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No 
Man's Land) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time ; 
that is, no time in which a man ought to be up and 
awake in. To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an 
hour or an hour and a half's duration, in which a man, 
whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to 
wait for his breakfast. 

Oh, those headaches at dawn of day, when at five or 
half -past five in summer, and not much later in the dark 
seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps 
not above four hours in bed (for we were no go-to-beds 
with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes 
in her rising ; we like a parting cup at midnight, as all 
young men did before these effeminate times, and to 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 113 

have our friends about us; we were not constellated 
under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore inca- 
pable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless ; we were none 
of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our de- 
grees at Mount Ague ; we were right toping capulets, 
jolly companions, we and they) ; but to have to get up, 
as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, 
with only a dim vista of refreshing bohea in the dis- 
tance ; to be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the de- 
testable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to 
take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it 
was *'time to rise," and whose chappy knuckles we have 
often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our 
chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable 
rest-breakers in future — 

"Facil" and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the 
"descending" of the over-night balmy, the first sinking 
of the heavy head upon the pillow ; but to get up, as he 
goes on to say — 

.... revocare gradus, auperasque evadere ad auras — 

and to get up, moreover, to make jokes with malice pre- 
pended, there was the "labor," there the " work." 

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like 
to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned 
out for half the tyranny which this necessity exercised 
upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays, 
too) — why, it seems nothmg ! We make twice the num- 
ber everyday in our lives as a matter of course, and 
claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come 
into our head. But when the head has to go out to 
them, when the mountain must go to Mahomet 

Keader, try it for once, only for one short twelve- 
month. 

8 



114 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

It was not every week that a fashion of pink stock- 
ings came up ; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, 
untractable subject; some topic impossible to be con- 
torted into the risible; some feature upon which no 
smile could play ; some flint from which no process of 
ingenuity could procure a scintillation. There they lay ; 
there your appointed tale of brickmaking was set before 
you, which you must finish, with or without straw, as it 
happened. The craving Dragon — the Public — like him 
in Bel's temple, must be fed ; it expected its daily ra- 
tions; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did 
the best we could on this side bursting him. 

While we were wringing out coy sprightlinesses for 
the " Post," and writhing under the toil of what is 
called " easy writing," Bob Allen, our quondam school- 
fellow, was tapping his impracticable brains in a like 
service for the " Oracle." Not that Kobert troubled 
himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a spright- 
ly air about them, it was sufficient. He carried this non- 
chalance so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and 
that no very important one, was not seldom palmed upon 
his employers for a good jest; for example's sake: 
" Walking yesterday morning casually down Snow JSill^ . 
whom should we meet hut Mr. Deputy Humphreys I We 
rejoice to add, that the worthy Deputy appeared to enjoy 
a good state of health. We do not ever rememder to have 
seen him looh 'better.'''' This gentleman, so surprisingly 
met upon Snow Hill, from some peculiarities in gait or 
gesture, was a constant butt for mirth to the small para- 
graph-mongers of the day ; and our friend thought that 
he might have his fling at him with the rest. "We met 
A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary rencounter, 
which he told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, and 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 115 

chuckling at the anticipated effects of its announcement 
next day in the paper. We did not quite comprehend 
where the wit of it lay at the time ; nor was it easy to 
be detected when the thing came out advantaged by type 
and letter-press. He had better have met anything that 
morning than a Common Councilman. His services were 
shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his para- 
graphs of late had been deficient in point. The one in 
question, it must be owned, had an air, in the opening 
especially, proper to awaken curiosity; and the senti- 
ment, or moral, wears the aspect of humanity and good- 
neighborly feeling. But somehow the conclusion was 
not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent prom- 
ise of the premises. We traced our friend's pen after- 
ward in the " True Briton," the " Star," the " Traveler," 
from all which he was successively dismissed, the pro- 
prietors having "no further occasion for his services." 
Nothing was easier than to detect him. When wit failed, 
or topics ran low, there constantly appeared the follow- 
ing : ^^ It is not generally known that the three Blue Balls 
at the PawnbroTcers' shops are the ancient arms of Lom- 
'bardy. The Lombards were the Jirst money brokers in 
Europe^ Bob has done more to set the public right on 
this important point of blazonry than the whole College 
of Heralds. 

The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased to 
be a part of the economy of a morning paper. Editors 
find their own jokes, or do as well without them. Par- 
son Este, and Topham, brought up the set custom of 
" witty paragraphs " first in the " World." Boaden was 
a reigning paragraphist in his day, and succeeded poor 
Allen in the " Oracle." But, as we said, the fashion of 
jokes passes away; and it would be difficult to discover 



116 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

in the biographer of Mrs. Siddons any traces of that vi- 
vacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the 
commencement of the present century. Even the pre- 
lusive delicacies of the present writer — the curt " Astrsean 
allusion " — would be thought pedantic and out of date in 
these days. 

From the office of the " Morning Post " (for we may 
as well exhaust our Newspaper Keminiscences at once), 
by change of property in the paper, we were transferred, 
mortifying exchange I to the of&ce of the "Albion" 
newspaper, late Rackstrow's Museum, in Fleet Street. 
What a transition — from a handsome apartment, from 
rosewood desks and sUver inkstands, to an office — ^no 
office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occu- 
pation of dead monsters, of which it seemed redolent — 
from the center of loyalty and fashion to a focus of vul- 
garity and sedition. Here in murky closet, inadequate 
from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies 
of editor and humble paragraph maker, together at one 
time, sat in the discharge of his new editorial functions 
(the " Bigod " of Elia) the redoubted John Fen wick. 

F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left 
not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might 
command, had purchased (on tick, doubtless) the whole 
and sole editorship, proprietorship, with all the rights 
and titles (such as they were worth), of the "Albion" 
from one Lovell ; of whom we know nothing, save that 
he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of 
Wales. With this hopeless concern, for it had been sink- 
ing ever since its commencement, and could now reckon 
upon not more than a hundred subscribers, F. resolutely 
determined upon pulling down the government in the 
first instance, and making both our fortunes by way of 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 117 

corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated 
democrat go about borrowing seven-shilling pieces, and 
lesser coin, to meet the daily demands from the Stamp 
Office, which allowed no credit to publications of that 
side in politics. An outcast from politer bread, we at- 
tached our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our 
friend. Our occupation now was to write treason. 

EecoUections of feelings which were all that now re- 
mained from our first boyish heats kindled by the French 
Revolution, when, if we were misled, we erred in the 
company of some who are accounted very good men now 
— rather than any tendency at this time to republican 
doctrines — assisted us in assuming a style of writing, 
while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under tone 
to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now 
to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdica- 
tions. Blocks, axes, "Whitehall tribunals, were covered 
with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis — as Mr. Bayes 
says, never naming the thing directly — that the keen eye 
of an Attorney-General was insufficient to detect the lurk- 
ing snake among them. There were times, indeed, when 
we sighed for our more gentlemanlike occupation under 
Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change 
of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we 
learned afterward from a gentleman at the Treasury, had 
begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being 
submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law 
Officers — when an unlucky epigram from our pen, aimed 

at Sir J s M h, who was on the eve of departing 

for India to reap the fruits of his apostasy, as F. pro- 
nounced it (it is hardly worth particularizing), happen- 
ing to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then 
delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. at 



118 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron 
that had stuck by us ; and breaking up our establishment, 
left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of 
the Crown Lawyers. It was about this time, or a little 
earlier, that Dan Stuart made that curious confession to 
us, that he had " never deliberately walked into an Ex- 
hibition at Somerset House in his life." 



BAEREN^NESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
m THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

HoGAETH excepted, can we produce any one painter 
within the last fifty years, or since the humor of exhibit- 
ing began, that has treated a story imaginatively ? By 
this we mean upon whom his subject has so acted, that 
it has seemed to direct Jiim — not to be arranged by him ? 
Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have 
impressed themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not 
treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation? 
Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely 
so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clear- 
ness, but that individualizing property which should 
keep the subject so treated distinct in feature from every 
other subject, however similar, and to common apprehen- 
sions almost identical ; so as that we might say, this and 
this part could have found an appropriate place in no 
other picture in the world but this? Is there anything 
in modern art — we will not demand that it should be 
equal — but in any way analogous to what Titian has 
effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 119 

in the " Ariadne," in the National Gallery ? Precipitous, 
with his reeling satyr rout about him, repeopling and re- 
illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new 
fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, firelike 
flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. 
With this telling of the story, an artist, and no ordinary 
one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmoni- 
ous version of it, saw no further. But from the depths 
of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, 
and laid it contributory with the present to one simul- 
taneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad 
cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence 
and new offers of a god, as if unconscious of Bacchus, 
or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning 
pageant — her soul undistracted from Theseus — Ariadne 
is still pacing the solitg,ry shore in as much heart silence, 
and in almost the same local solitude, with which she 
awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of 
the sail that bore away the Athenian. 

Here are two points miraculously co-uniting : fierce 
society with the feeling of solitude still absolute ; noon- 
day revelations, with the accidents of the dull gray dawn 
unquenched and lingering; the present Bacchus, with 
the past Ariadne ; two stories, with double Time ; sepa- 
rate, and harmonizing. Had the artist made the woman 
one shade less indifferent to the god — still more, had she 
expressed a rapture at his advent — where would have 
been the story of the mighty desolation of the heart pre- 
vious? Merged in the insipid accident of a flattering 
offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken 
heart for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by a 
god. 

We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture 



120 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

by Kaphael in tlie Yatican. It is the Presentation of 
the new-born Eve to Adam bj the Ahnighty. A fairer 
mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodher 
sire, perhaps, of men since born. But these are matters 
subordinate to the conception of the situation displayed 
in this extraordinary production. A tolerably modern 
artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain 
raptures of connubial anticipation with a suitable ac- 
knowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the coun- 
tenance of the first bridegroom; something like the 
divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child- 
man) between the given toy and the mother who had 
just blest it with the bawble. This is the obvious, 
the first-sight view, the superficial. An artist of a 
higher grade, considering the awful presence they were 
in, would have taken care to subtract something from 
the expression of the more human passion, and to height- 
en the more spiritual one. This would be as much as an 
exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to 
last year's show, has been encouraged to look for. It is 
obvious to hint at a lower expression yet, in a picture 
that, for respects of drawing and coloring, might be 
deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-foster- 
ing walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine, 
the gratitude as one, or perhaps zerol By neither the 
one passion nor the other has Kaphael expounded the 
situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the ab- 
sorbing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The 
moment is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self- 
conscious of his art, in which neither of the conflicting 
pmotions — a moment how abstracted — has had time to 
ppring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. "We have 
seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in which 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 121 

he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely 
beautiful in antiquity — the gardens of the Hesperides. 
To do Mr. justice, he had painted a laudable or- 
chard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of 
which a Polypheme, by Poussin, is somehow a facsimile 
for the situation), looking over into the world shut out 
backward, so that none but a " still-climbing Hercules " 
could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary 
of Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his eyes 
better than this custos with the " lidless eyes." He not 
only sees that none do intrude into that privacy, but, as 
clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diabolus 
by any manner of means can. So far all is well. We 
have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra the 
damsels are snug enough. But here the artist's courage 
seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty 
charge, and, to comfort the irksomeness, has peopled 
their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of 
honor or ladies of the bedchamber, according to the ap- 
proved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century ; 
giving to the whole scene the air of s^fete champetre, if 
we will but excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This 
is well, and Watteauish. But what is become of the 
solitary mystery — the 

Daughters three, 
That sing around the golden tree ? 

This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated 
this subject. 

The paintings — or rather the stupendous architectural 
designs — of a modern artist have been urged as objec- 
tions to the theory of our motto. They are of a charac- 
ter, we confess, to stagger it. His towered structures 



122 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

are of the highest order of the material sublime. Wheth- 
er they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder work- 
manship — Assyrian ruins old — restored by this mighty 
artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving con- 
ceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity 
that they were ever peopled. On that side, the imagina- 
tion of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us 
examine the point of the story in the " Belshazzar's 
Feast." We will introduce it by an apposite anecdote. 

The court historians of the day record that at the 
first dinner given by the late King (then Prince Eegent) 
at the Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was 
played off. The gaests were select and admiring ; the 
banquet profuse and admirable ; the lights lustrous and 
oriental ; the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display 
of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought 
from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose — 
itself a tower I — stood conspicuous for its magnitude. 
And now the Rev. . . ., the then admired court Chap- 
lain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal 
given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge 
transparency was discovered, in which glittered in gold 
letters — 

" Brighton— Earthquake — Swallow-up-alive ! " 

Imagine the confusioa of the guests — the Georges and 
garters, jewels, bracelets, molted upon the occasion ! the 
fans dropped, and picked up the next morning by the sly 
court pages! Mrs. Fitz-what's-her-name fainting, and 
the Countess of . . . holding the smelling-bottle, till the 
good-humored Prince caused harmony to be restored by 
calling in fresh candles, and declaring that the whole 
was nothing but a pantomime hoax^ got up by the ingeni- 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 123 

ous Mr. Farley, of Oovent Garden, from hints which his 
Royal Highness himself had furnished! Then imagine 
the infinite applause that followed, the mutual rallyings, 
the declarations that " they were not much frightened," 
of the assembled galaxy. 

The point of time in the picture exactly answers to 
the appearance of the transparency in the anecdote. 
The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarms, 
and the mock alarm ; the prettiness heightened by con- 
sternation ; the courtier's fear which was flattery ; and 
the lady's which was affectation ; all that we may con- 
ceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton courtiers, 
sympathizing with the well-acted surprise of the sover- 
eign — all this and no more, is exhibited by the well- 
dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. Just this 
sort of consternation we have seen among a flock of dis- 
quieted wild geese at the report ouly of a gun having 
gone off! 

But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for 
the preservation of their persons — such as we have wit- 
nessed at a theatre, when a slight alarm of fire has been 
given —an adequate exponent of a supernatural terror ? 
the way in which the finger of God, writing judgments, 
would have been met by the withered conscience? 
There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is 
disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. The other is 
bowed down, effortless, passive. When the spirit ap- 
peared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night, and 
the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts of 
the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call 
up the servants? But let us see in the text what there 
is to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. 

From the works of Daniel it appears Belshazzar had 



124 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

made a great feast to a thousand of liis lords, and drank 
wine before the thousand. The golden and silver ves- 
sels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the 
king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows : 

" In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's 
hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the 
plaster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the Icing 
saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the Tcing^s 
countenance was changed and his thoughts troubled him, 
so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his 
knees smote one against another." 

This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise 
inferred, but that the appearance was solely confined to 
the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was troubled. 
Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there 
present, not even by the queen herself, who merely un- 
dertakes for the interpretation of the phenomenon, as 
related to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lords are 
simply said to be astonished; i. e., at the trouble and the 
change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the 
prophet does not appear to have seen the scroll, which 
the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph did the 
Dream to the King of Egypt. " Then was the part of 
the hand sent from him [the Lord], and this writing was 
written." He speaks of the phantasm as past. 

Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of 
the miracle ? this message to a royal conscience, singly 
expressed — ^for it was said, " Thy kingdom is divided " — 
simultaneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand 
courtiers, who were implied in it neither directly nor 
grammatically ? 

But admitting the artist's own version of the story, 
and that the sight was seen also by the thousand cour- 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 125 

tiers — ^let it have been visible to all Babylon — as the 
knees of Belshazzar were shaken, and his countenance 
troubled, even so would the knees of every man in Bab- 
ylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, 
have been troubled ; bowed, bent down, so would they 
have remained, stupor-fixed, with no thought of strug- 
gling with that inevitable judgment. 

Not all that is optically possible to be seen is to be 
shown in every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon 
the brilliant individualities in a " Marriage at Cana," by 
Veronese or Titian, to the very texture and color of the 
wedding-garments, the ring glittering upon the bride's 
finger, the metal and fashion of the wine-pots ; for at 
such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. 
But in a " day of judgment," or in a " day of lesser hor- 
rors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, 
the eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or patient 
in the immediate scene would see, only in masses and 
indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry 
exposed to the critical eye of fashion, as minutely as the 
dresses in a Lady's Magazine, in the criticised picture, 
but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical science, and 
studied diversities of posture, in the falling angels and 
sinners of Michael Angelo, have no business in their 
great subjects. There was no leisure for them. 

By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting 
got at their true conclusions ; by not showing the actual 
appearances, that is, all was to be seen at any given mo- 
ment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might 
be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some por- 
tentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing 
up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen — houses, 
columns, architectural proportions, differences of public 



126 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

and private buildings, men and women at tlieir standing 
occupations, the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, 
dresses — in some confusion truly, but physically they 
were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing 
moment, which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and 
when the senses are upturned from their proprieties, 
when sight and hearing are a feeling only ? A thousand 
years have passed, and we are at leisure to contemplate 
the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his 
oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots 
and pans of Pompeii. 

" Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, 
in the valley of Ajalon." "Who, in reading this magnifi- 
cent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but the 
heroic son of Nun, with the outstretched arm, and the 
greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there 
were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen 
on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the 
circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes 
would have been conscious of this array at the interposi- 
tion of the synchronic miracle ? Yet in the picture of 
this subject by the artist of the " Belshazzar's Feast " — 
no ignoble work either — the marshaling and landscape of 
the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote 
of the day ; and the eye may " dart through rank and 
file traverse " for some minutes, before it shall discover, 
among his armed followers, wMch is Joshua! Not mod- 
ern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found 
if anywhere, can be detected erring from defect of this 
imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of 
the preternatural in painting, transcending the figure of 
Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture 
at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 127 

A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly appre- 
hending gratitude at second life bestowed. It can not 
forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a 
body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. Was it from 
a feeling that the crowd of half-impassioned bystanders, 
and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a dis- 
tance, who have not heard or but faintly have been told 
of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design 
and hue — for it is a glorified work — do not respond ade- 
quately to the action, that the single figure of the La- 
zarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the 
mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the 
greater half of the interest ? N^ow that there were not 
indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of 
those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it 
had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardi- 
hood to assert ; but would they see them ? or can the 
mind in the conception of it admit of such unconcerning 
objects — can it think of them at all ? or what associating 
league to the imagination can there be between the seers 
and the seers not of a presential miracle ? 

Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a 
Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of 
expectation, the patron would not or ought not to be 
fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent 
under wide-stretched oaks? Disseat those woods, and 
place the same figure among fountains and fall of pellucid 
water, and you have a — Naiad ! Not so in a rough print 
we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is 
long since. There, by no process, with mere change of 
scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. 
Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, 
beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her 



128 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

connatural tree, cotwisting with its limbs her own, till 
both seemed either — these, animated branches; those, 
disanimated members — yet the animal and vegetable lives 
sufficiently kept distinct — his Dryad lay — an approxima- 
tion of two natures, which to conceive it must be seen ; 
analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian 
transform ations. 

To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial compre- 
hension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave lofti- 
ness and fruitf ulness. The large eye of genius saw in the 
meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment 
from their relations to some grand Past or Future. How 
has Eaphael — we must still linger about the Vatican — 
treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in Ms " Build- 
ing of the Ark " ? It is in that scriptural series to which we 
have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough 
old graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to 
be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the Car- 
toons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. 
There is a cowardice in modern art. As the Frenchman, 
of whom Coleridge's friend made the prophetic guess at 
Eome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael 
Angelo, collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat 
and a Cornuto ; so from this subject, of mere mechanic 
promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one 
incapable of investitude with any grandeur. The dock- 
yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. 
The depot at Chatham would be the mote and the beam 
in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical prepara- 
tions in the ship-yards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael 
look for instructions, when he imagined the Building of 
the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of 
the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 129 

action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the 
operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, 
and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there 
are his agents — the solitary but suflScient Three — hew- 
ing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of 
a Demiurgus ; under some instinctive rather than techni- 
cal guidance ! giant-muscled ; every one a Hercules, or 
liker to those Yulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns 
under Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black 
Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work the workmen that 
should repair a world ! 

Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with 
pictorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents 
are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. 
Othello's color — the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir 
John Falstaff — do they haunt us perpetually in the read- 
ing? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions one 
time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the 
respective moral or intellectual attributes of the charac- 
ter ? But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor, 
and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealized, 
and enchained hopelessly in the groveling fetters of ex- 
ternality, must be the mind to which, in its better mo- 
ments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced 
Quixote — the errant Star of Knighthood, made more 
tender by eclipse — has never presented itself, divested 
from the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a 
rabblement at the heels of Eosinante. That man has 
read his book by halves ; he has laughed, mistaking his 
author's purport, which was — tears. The artist that 
pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point that he 
is every season held up at our Exhibitions) in the shal- 
low hope of exciting mirth would have joined the rabble 
9 



130 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see 
that counterfeited which we would not have wished to 
see in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of the 
noble Quixote, who on hearing that his withered person 
was passing, would have stepped over his threshold to 
gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the " strange bed- 
fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with ? " 
Shade of Cervantes ! who in thy Second Part could put 
into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of 
a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of 
the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their 
pretty networks, and inviting him to be a guest with 
them in accents like these : " Truly, fairest Lady, ActsBon 
was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing her- 
self at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your 
beauty. I commend the manner of your pastime, and 
thank you for your kind offers ; and, if I may serve you, 
so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may command 
me: for my profession is this. To show myself thankful 
and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially of the 
rank that your person shows you to be ; and if those 
nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should 
take up the whole world, I should seek out new worlds 
to pass through, rather than break them : and (he adds) 
that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, be- 
hold at least he that promiseth you this is Don Quixote 
de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your 
hearing." Illustrious Eomancer ! were the " fine fren- 
zies " which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote a fit 
subject, as in this Second Part, to be exposed to the 
jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to bemonstered, and 
shownupatthe heartless banquets of great men? Was 
that pitiable infirmity, which in thy Pirst Part misleads 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 131 

him, always from within, into half-ludicrous, but more than 
half-compassionable and admirable errors, not infliction 
enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must 
devise and practice upon the humor, to inflame where 
they should soothe it ! Why, Goneril would have blushed 
to practice upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the 
she wolf Regan not have endured to play the pranks 
upon his fled wits, which thou hast made thy Quixote 
suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hand of that un- 
worthy nobleman.* 

In the first adventures, even, it needed all the art of 
the most consummate artist in the book way that the 
world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the read- 
er the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing, 
80 as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the 
debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes 
itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh ; or no^ 
rather, to indulge a contrary emotion ? Cervantes, stur t, 
perchance, by the relish with which Ma reading p'' ug, 
had received the fooleries of the man, more to theirblic 
ates than the generosities of the master, in the seqr pal- 
his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balaD.iel let 
sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contem -ce, and 
We know that in the present day the Knight .poraries. 
admirers than the Squire. Anticipating what has fewer 
happen to him — as afterward it did to his s' did actually 
follower, the author of " Guzman de Alf ^arce inferior / 
some less knowing hand would prevent hiarache " — that 7 
Second Part; and judging that it would-in by a spurious'^ 
competitor to outbid him in the comic- be easier for h"*^^ 
romance of his work, he abandoned ] alities than in ^^® 

* Yet from this Second Part our crie '^^^ ^^^g^it, and^ 
selected — the waiting-women with beaJ.-up pictures are y.'^^^^^Y 

x'ds, etc. / 



132 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

fair] J set up the Squire for Ms Hero. For what else has 
he unsealed the eyes of Sancho? and instead of that twi- 
light state of semi-insanity — ^the madness at second hand 
— the contagion caught from a stronger mind infected — 
that war between native cunning and hereditary defer- 
ence, with which he has hitherto accompanied his master 
— two for a pair almost — does he substitute a downright 
Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following 
a confessed Madman ; and offering at one time to lay, if 
not actually laying, hands upon him I From the moment 
that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become 
a treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly. 



THE WEDDING. 



' DO not know when I have been better pleased than 
Xing invited last week to be present at the wedding 
at be iend's daughter. I like to make one at these cere- 
of a fr which to us old people give back our youth in a 
monies, and restore our gayest season, in the remem- 
manner, '^ur own success, or the regrets, scarcely less 
brance of (^ur own youthful disappointments, in this 
tender of element. On these occasions I am sure to 
1 point of a setior for a week or two after, and enjoy a 
r*^ be in good humoon. Being without a family, I am flat- 
ten eiiected honeyn temporary adoptions into a friend^s 
fam -ed with these't of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the 
seaso Qy . I feel a soiid into degrees of afl&nity ; and, in 
the p^, n • I am inducUties of the little community, I lay 
down tv rticipated socii my solitary bachelorship. I car- 
or a brief whik 



THE WEDDING. 133 

ry this humor so far, that I take it unkindly to be left 
out, even when a funeral is going on in the house of a 
dear friend. But to my subject. 

The union itself had been long settled, but its celebra- 
tion had been hitherto deferred, to an almost unreason- 
able state of suspense in the lovers, by some invincible 
prejudices which the bride's father had unhappily con- 
tracted upon the subject of the too early marriages of 
females. He has been lecturing any time these live years 
— for to that length the courtship has been protracted — 
upon the propriety of putting off the solemnity till the 
lady should have completed her five-and-twentieth year. 
We all began to be afraid that a suit, which as yet had 
abated of none of its ardors, might at last be lingered on 
till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the ex- 
periment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, 
who was by no means a party to these overstrained no- 
tions, joined to some serious expostulations on that of 
his friends, who, from the growing infirmities of the old 
gentleman, could not promise ourselves many years' en- 
joyment of his company, and were anxious to bring mat- 
ters to a conclusion during his lifetime, at length pre- 
vailed ; and on Monday last the daughter of my old friend, 
Admiral , having attained the womanly age of nine- 
teen, was conducted to the church by her pleasant cousin 
J , who told some few years older. 

Before the youthful part of my female readers ex- 
press their indignation at the abominable loss of time 
occasioned to the lovers by the preposterous notions of 
my old friend, they will do well to consider the reluc- 
tance which a fond parent naturally feels at parting with 
his child. To this unwillingness, I believe, in most cases 
may be traced the difference of opinion on this point be- 



134 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

tween child and parent, whatever pretences of interest or 
prudence may be held out to cover it. The hardhearted- 
ness of fathers is a fine theme for romance writers, a sure 
and moving topic ; but is there not something untender, 
to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child 
is sometimes in to tear herself from the paternal stock, 
and commit herself to strange graftings? The case is 
heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, 
happens to be an only child. I do not understand these 
matters experimentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at 
the wounded pride of a parent upon these occasions. It 
is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases 
has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Cer- 
tainly there is a jealousy in unparallel subjects^ which is 
little less heart-rending than the passion which we more 
strictly christen by that name. Mothers' scruples are 
more easily got over ; for this reason, I suppose, that the 
protection transferred to a husband is less a derogation 
and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. Moth- 
ers, besides, have a trembling foresight, which paints the 
inconveniences (impossible to be conceived in the same 
degree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy 
which a refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon 
their child. Mothers' instinct is a surer guide here than 
the cold reasonings of a father on such a topic. To this 
instinct may be imputed, and by it alone maybe excused, 
the unbeseeming artifices by which some wives push on 
the matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the 
husband, however approving, shall entertain with com- 
parative indiflference. A little shamelessness on this 
head is pardonable. "With this explanation, forwardness 
becomes a grace, and maternal importunity receives the 
name of a virtue. But the parson stays, while I prepos- 



THE WEDDING. 135 

terously assume his office; I am preaching, while the 
bride is on the threshold. -. . - u 

Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the 
sage reflections which have just escaped me have the 
obliquest tendency of application to the young lady, who, 
it will be seen, is about to venture upon a change m her 
condition at a mature and competent age, and not without 
the fullest approbation of all parties. I only deprecate 
'cery hasty marriages. 

It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone 
through at an early hour, to give time for a little dejeuner 
afterward, to which a select party of friends had been 
invited. We were in church a little before the clock 

struck eight. 

Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the 
dress of the bridemaids— the three charming Miss For- 
esters-on this morning. To give the bride an oppor- 
tunity of shining singly, they had come habited all m 
green. I am ill at describing female apparel ; but while 
she stood at the altar in vestments white and candid as 
her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in 
robes such as might become Diana's nymphs-Foresters 
indeed-as such who had not yet come to the resolution 
of putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not 
being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep 
single for their father's sake, and live all together so 
happy with their remaining parent, that the hearts of 
their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so inau- 
spicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and pro- 
voking home-comfort. Gallant girls ! each a victim wor- 
thy of Iphigenia ! • 

I do not know what business I have to be present m 
solemn places. I can not divest ine of an unseasonable 



136 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions. I 
was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony 
and I liave long shaken hands ; but I could not resist 
the importunities of the young lady's father, whose gout 
unhappily confined him at home, to act as parent on this 
occasion, and give away the bride. Something ludicrous 
occurred to me at this most serious of all moments — a 
sense of my unfitness to have the disposal, even in im- 
agination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear 
I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of 
the parson — and the rector's eye of St. Mildred's in the 
Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke — was upon me in an in- 
stant, souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities 
of a funeral. 

This was the only misbehavior which I can plead to 
upon this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to 
me after the ceremony, by one of the handsome Miss 

T s, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to 

say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give 
away a bride in black. Now black has been my ordinary 
apparel so long — ^indeed, I take it to be the proper cos- 
tume of an author — the stage sanctions it — that to have 
appeared in some lighter color (a pea-green coat, for 
instance, like the bridegroom's) would have raised more 
mirth at my expense than the anomaly had created cen- 
sure. But I could perceive that the bride's mother and 
some elderly ladies present (God bless them !) would 
have been well content, if I had come in any other color 
than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, 
which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian au- 
thor, of all the birds being invited to the linnet's wedr 
ding, at which, when all the rest came in their gayest 
feathers, the raven alone apologized for his cloajf be^ 



THE WEDDING. 137 

cause " he had no other." This tolerably reconciled the 
elders. But with the young people all was merriment, 
and shaking of hands, and congratulations, and kissing 
away the bride's tears, and kissing from her in return, 
till a young lady, who assumed some experience in these 
matters, having worn the nuptial bands some four or five 
weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, archly observ- 
ing, with half an eye upon the bridegroom, that at this 
rate she would have " none left." 

My friend the Admiral was in fine wig and buckle on 
this occasion — a striking contrast to his usual neglect of 
personal appearance. He did not once shove up his 
borrowed locks (his custom ever at his morning studies) 
to betray the few gray stragglers of his own beneath 
them. He wore an aspect of thoughtful satisfaction. 
I trembled for the hour, which at length approached, 
when after a protracted hreakfast of three hours — if 
stores of cold fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried 
fruits, wines, cordials, etc., can deserve so meager an 
appellation — the coach was announced, which was come 
to carry off the bride and bridegroom for a season, as 
custom has sensibly ordained, into the country; upon 
which design, wishing them a felicitous journey, let us 
return to the assembled guests. 

As when a well-graced actor IcJives the stage, 

The eyes of men 

Are idly bent on him that enters next — 

so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another when the 
chief performers in the morning's pageant had vanished. 
None told his tale. None sipped her glass. The poor 
Admiral made an effort — it was not much. I had anti- 
cipated so far. Even the infinity of full satisfaction, that 



138 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

had betrayed itseK through the prim looks and quiet de- 
portment of his lady, began to wane into something of 
misgiving. No one knew whether to take their leaves 
or stay. We seemed assembled upon a silly occasion. 
In this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure, I must do 
justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise 
like to have brought me into disgrace in the forepart of 
the day ; I mean a power, in any emergency, of thinking 
and giving vent to all manner of strange nonsense. In 
this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled 
off some of my most excellent absurdities. AH were 
willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from 
the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had suc- 
ceeded to the morning bustle. By this means I was for- 
tunate in keeping together the better part of the com- 
pany to a late hour ; and a rubber of whist (the Admir- 
al's favorite game), with some rare strokes of chance as 
well as skill, which came opportunely on his side — length- 
ened out till midnight — dismissed the old gentleman at 
last to his bed with comparatively easy spirits. 

I have been at my old friend's various times since. 
I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so 
perfectly at ease ; nowhere, where harmony is so strange- 
ly the result of confusion. Everybody is at cross pur- 
poses, yet the effect is so much better than uniformity. 
Contradictory orders ; servants pulling one way, master 
and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse ; visi- 
tors huddled up in corners ; chairs unsymmetrized ; can- 
dles disposed by chance ; meals at odd hours, tea and 
supper at once, or the latter preceding the former ; the 
host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different 
topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to un- 
derstand or hear the other ; draughts and politics, chess 



NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 139 

and political economy, cards and conversation on nauti- 
cal matters, going on at once, without the hope, or indeed 
the wish, of distinguishing them, make it altogether the 
most perfect concordia discors you shall meet with. Yet 
somehow the old house is not quite what it should be. 
The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss 
Emily to fill it for him. The instrument stands where it 
stood, but she is gone whose delicate touch could some- 
times for a short minute appease the warring elements. 
He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to *'make his des- 
tiny his choice." He bears bravely up, but he does not 
come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as form- 
erly. His sea-songs seldomer escape him. His wife, too, 
looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and 
set to rights. We all miss a junior presence. It is won- 
derful how one young maiden freshens up, and keeps 
green, the paternal roof. Old and young seem to have 
an interest in her, so long as she is not absolutely dis- 
posed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. Em- 
ily is married. 



REJOIOmGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S OOMINa 
OF AGE.* 

The Old Tear being dead, and the I^ew Year coming 
of age, which he does, by Calendar Law, as soon as the 
breath is out of the old gentleman's body, nothing would 
serve the young spark but he must give a dinner upon 
the occasion, to which all the Bays in the year were in- 
vited. The Festivals, whom he deputed as his stewards, 

* This signed Elia's Ghost. 



140 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

were mightily taken with the notion. They had been 
engaged time out of mind, they said, in providing mirth 
and good cheer for mortals below ; and it was time they 
should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly 
debated among them whether the Fasts should be ad- 
mitted. Some said the appearance of such lean, starved 
guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the ends 
of the meeting. But the objection was overruled by 
Christmas Day^ who had a design upon Ash Wednesday 
(as you shall hear), and a naughty desire to see how the 
old Dominie would behave himself in his cups. Only the 
Vigils were requested to come with their lanterns, to 
light the gentlefolks home at night. 

All the Days came to their day. Covers were pro- 
vided for three hundi-ed and sixty-five guests at the prin- 
cipal table ; with an occasional knife and fork at the 
sideboard for the Twenty-Ninth of February. 

I should have told you that cards of invitation had 
been issued. The carriers were the Hours ; twelve little 
merry, whirligig foot-pages as you should desire to see, 
that went all round, and found out the persons invited 
well enough, with the exception of Easter Day^ Shrove 
Tuesday^ and a few such Movables, who had lately shifted 
their quarters. 

Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all 
sorts of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There 
was nothing but, Hail ! fellow Day — well met, brother 
j)ay — sister Day. Only Lady Day kept a little on the 
aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said 
Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tif- 
fany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, 
all royal, glittering, and Fpiphanous. The rest came, 
some in green, some in white ; but old Lent and his 



NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 141 

family were not yet out of mourning. Eainy Days carae 
in, dripping ; and sunshiny Days helped them to change 
their stockings. Wedding Bay was there in his marriage 
finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, 
as he always does; and Doomsday sent word — he might 
be expected. 

April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon 
himself to marshal the guests, and wild work he made 
with it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have 
found out any given Day in the year, to erect a scheme 
upon — good Days^ had Days were so shuffled together, 
to the confounding of all sober horoscopy. 

He had stuck the Twenty-First of June next to the 
Twenty-Second of December^ and the former looked like 
a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Ash Wednesday got 
wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and 
Lord Mayor'' s Days. Lord! how he laid about him! 
Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down 
with him — to the great greasing and detriment of his 
new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day 
was at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, till 
he roared, and hiccup'd, and protested there was no faith 
in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a eour, 
windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical 
mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his 
fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before 
his left-hand neighbor, and daubed his hungry beard all 
over with it, till you would have taken him for the Last 
Day in December^ it so hung in icicles. 

At another part of the table. Shrove Tuesday was 
helping the Second of September to some cock broth — 
which courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh 
of a hen pheasant ; so there was no love lost for that 



142 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

matter. The Last of Lent ^2,^ sponging upon Shrove- 
tide's pancakes ; whicli April Fool perceiving, told Lira 
he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry- 
day. 

In another part, a huhhub arose abont the Thirtieth 
of January^ who, it seems, being a sour puritanic char- 
acter, that thought nobody's meat good or sanctified 
enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calf's 
head, which he had cooked at home for that purpose, 
thinking to feast thereon incontinently ; but as it lay in 
the dish March Many -weathers^ who is a very fine lady, 
and subject to the meagrims, screamed out there was a 
" human head in the platter," and raved about Herodias's 
daughter to that degree, that the obnoxious viand was 
obliged to be removed ; nor did she recover her stomach 
till she had gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oah 
Apple, which the merry Twenty-Ninth of May always 
carries about with him for that purpose. 

The King's health being called for after this, a not- 
able dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a 
zealous old Whig gentlewoman), and the Twenty-Third 
of April (a new fangled lady of the Tory stamp), as to 
which of them should have the honor to propose it. Au- 
gust grew hot upon the matter, affirming time out of 
mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her 
rival had basely supplanted her ; whom she represented 
as little better than a Tcept mistress, who went about in 
fine clothes, while she (the legitimate Biethdat) had 
scarcely a rag, etc. 

April Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right 
in the strongest form of words to the appellant, but de- 
cided for peace' sake that the exercise of it should re- 
main with the present possessor. At the same time, he 



NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. I43 

slyly rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action 
might lie against the Crown for hi-geny. 

It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas lus- 
tily bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the 
Days^ who protested against burning daylight. Then 
fair water was handed round in silver ewers, and the 
same lady was observed to take an unusual time in 
Washing herself. 

May Day^ with that sweetness which is peculiar to 
her, in a neat speech proposing the health of the founder, 
crowned her goblet (and by her example the rest of the 
company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly 
New Year from the upper end of the table, in a cordial 
but somewhat lofty tone, returned thanks. He felt proud 
on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy father's 
late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the 
same time to abate (if anything was found unreasonable) 
in their rents. 

At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days invol- 
tarily looked at each other, and smiled ; April Fool 
whistled to an old tune of " New Brooms " ; and a surly 
old rebel at the further end of the table (who was dis- 
covered to be no other than the Fifth of November) mut- 
tered out, distinctly enough to be heard by the whole 
company, words to this effect, that "when the old one is 
gone, he is a fool that looks for a better." Which rude- 
ness of his, the guests resenting, unanimously voted his 
expulsion ; and the malcontent was thrust out neck and 
heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a 
houtefeu and firebrand as he had shown himself to be. 

Order being restored, the young lord (who, to say the 
truth, had been a little ruffled, and put aside his oratory) 
in as few, and yet as obliging words as possible, assured 



144 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

them of entire welcome ; and, with a graceful turn sing- 
ling out poor Twenty-Ninth of Februa/ry that sat all this 
while mumchance at the sidehoard, begged to couple his 
health with that of the good company before him — which 
he drank accordingly; observing that he had not seen 
his honest face any time these four years — with a num- 
ber of endearing expressions besides. At the same time, 
removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat which 
had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own 
board, somewhere between the Greek Calends and Latter 
Lammas. 

Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with 
his eyes stuck fast in his head, and as well as the Canary 
he had swallowed would give him leave, struck up a 
carol, which Christmas Day had taught him for the 
nonce ; and was followed by the latter, who gave " Mis- 
erere " in fine style, hitting off the mumping tones and 
lengthened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite hu- 
mor. April Fool swore they had exchanged conditions; 
but Good Friday was observed to look extremely grave ; 
and Sunday held her fan before her face, that she might 
not be seen to smile. 

Shrovetide^ Lord Mayor^s Day^ and April Fool^ next 
joined in a glee — 

Which is the properest day to drink ? 

in which all the Days, chiming in, made a merry burden. 
They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The 
question being proposed, who had the greatest number 
of followers, the Quarter Days said there could be no 
question as to that ; for they had all the creditors in the 
world dogging their heels. But April Fool gave it in fa- 
vor of the Forty Days iefore Easter; because the 



NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 145 

debtors in all cases outnumbered the creditors, and they 
kept lent all the year. 

All this while Valentine's Day kept courting pretty 
May^ who sat next him, slipping amorous billets-doux* 
under the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of 
a warm constitution) began to be Jealous, and to bark 
and rage exceedingly. April Fool^ who likes a bit of 
sport above measure, and had some pretensions to the 
lady besides, as being but a cousin once removed, clapped 
and halloo'd them on ; and as fast as their indignation 
cooled, those mad wags, the Einber Days^ were at it with 
their bellows to blow it into a flame ; and all was in a fer- 
ment, till old Madam SeptvMgesima (who boasts herself 
the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conversation 
with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could reckon 
when she was young ; and of one Master Rogation Day 
in particular, who was for ever putting the question to 
her ; but she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle 
would tell — by which I apprehended she meant the Al- 
manac. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone^ 
the good old Days^ and so to the Days tefore the Flood — 
which plainly showed her old head to be little better 
than crazed and doited. 

Day being ended, the days called for their cloaks and 
great coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor^s Day 
went off in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a deep black 
Fog, that wrapt the little gentleman all round like a 
hedgehog. Two Vigils — so watchmen are called in 
heaven — saw Christmas Day safe home ; they had been 
used to the business before. Another Vigil -^ a stout, 
sturdy patrol, called the Ike of St. Christopher — seeing 
Ash Wednesday in a condition little better than he should 
be, e'en whipt him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fash- 
10 



146 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

ion, and Old Mortification went floating Lome singing 

On the bat's back do I fly 

and a nnmber of old snatches besides, between drunk 
and sober; but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you 
may believe me) were among them. Longest Bay set off 
westward in beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some 
in one fashion, some in another; but Valentine and 
pretty May took their departure together in one of the 
prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day could wish to 
set in. 



OLD CHINA. 



I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old china. 
When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china- 
closet, and next for the picture-gallery. I can not de- 
fend the order of preference, but by saying that we have 
all some taste or other of too ancient a date to admit of 
our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. 
I can call to mind the first play and the first exhibition 
that I was taken to ; but I am not conscious of a time 
when china jars and saucers were introduced into my 
imagination. 

1 had no repugnance then — why should I now have ? 
— to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, 
under the notion of men and women, float about, uncir- 
cumscribed by any element, in that world before perspec- 
tive — a china teacup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance can 
not diminish— figuring up in the air (so they appear to 



OLD CHINA. 147 

our optics), yet on terra firma still ; for so we must in 
courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue whicli the 
decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring 
up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the women, 
if possible, with still more womanish expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to 
a lady from a salver — two miles off. See how distance 
seems to set off respect ! And here the same lady, or an- 
other — for likeness is identity on teacups — is stepping 
into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this 
calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in 
a right angle of incidence (as angles go iu our world) 
must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead, 
a furlong off, on the other side of the same strange 
stream I 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their 
world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. 

Here, a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive — 
so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of 
fine Cathay. 

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our 
Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink un- 
mixed still of an afternoon), some of these speciosa mir- 
acula upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent 
purchase) which we were now for the first time using ; 
and could not help remarking how favorable circum- 
stances had been to us of late years, that we could afford 
to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — 
when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows 
of my companion. I am quick at detecting these sum- 
mer clouds in Bridget. 

" I wish the good old times would come again," she 



148 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

said, " when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean 
that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state " 
— so she was pleased to ramble on — "in which I am 
sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but 
a purchase, now that you have money enough and to 
spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we 
coveted a cheap luxury (and oh I how much ado I had 
to get you to consent in those times ! ), we were used to 
have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh 
the for and against, and think what we might spare it 
out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should 
be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, 
when we felt the money that we paid for it. . 

" Do you remember the brown suit which you made 
to hang upon you till all your friends cried shame upon 
you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that folio 
Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged home late at 
night from Barker's in Oovent Garden ? Do you remem- 
ber how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up 
our minds to the purchase, and had not come to deter- 
mination tiU it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday 
night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should 
be too late — and when the old bookseller with some 
grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper 
(for he was setting bedward) lighted out the relic from 
his dusty treasures — and when you lugged it home, wish- 
ing it were twice as cumbersome — and when you pre- 
sented it to me — and when we were exploring the per- 
fectness of it {collating you called it) — and while I was 
repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your 
impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak — 
was there no pleasure in being a poor man ? Or can 
those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so 



OLD CHINA. 149 

careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and 
finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you 
flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your old corbeau 
— for four or five weeks longer than you should have 
done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of 
fifteen — or sixteen shillings was it? — a great affair we 
thought it then — which you had lavished on the old 
folio ? Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases 
you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any 
nice old purchase now. 

" When you came home with twenty apologies for 
laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after 
Leonardo, which we christened the ' Lady Blanch ; ' when 
you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money 
— and thought of the money, and looked again at the 
picture — was there no pleasure in being a poor man? 
Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Col- 

naghi's, as W calls it, and buy a wilderness of 

Leonardos. Yet do you ? 

" Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to En- 
field, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had a 
holiday — holidays, and all other fun, are gone now we 
are rich — and the little hand-basket in which I used to 
deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad — and 
how you would pry about at noon-tide for some decent 
house, where we might go in and produce our store, only 
paying for the ale that you must call for, and speculate 
upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was 
likely to allow us a table-cloth — and wish for such an- 
other honest hostess, as Izaak Walton has described 
many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he 
went a-fishing — and sometimes they would prove oblig- 
ing enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly 



150 THE LAST ESSAYS OP ELIA. 

upon us — but we had cheerful looks stiU for one another, 
and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging 
Piscator his Trout Hall ? l^ow, when we go out a day's 
pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of 
the way, and go into a fine inn, and order the best of 
dinners, never debating the expense — which, after all, 
never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, 
when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage and a 
precarious welcome. 

" You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but 
in the pit or boxes. Do you remember where it was we 
used to sit, when we saw the ' Battle of Hexham,' and 
the '■ Surrender of Calais,' and Bannister and Mrs. Bland 
in the ' Children in the Wood ' — when we squeezed out 
our shillings apiece to sit three or four times in a season 
in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt all the time 
that you ought not to have brought me, and more strong- 
ly I felt obligation to you for having brought me — and 
the pleasure was the better for a little shame— and when 
the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the 
house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when 
our thoughts were with Eosalind in Arden, or with Viola 
at the Court of Hlyria? You used to say that the gallery 
was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially; 
that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion 
to the infrequency of going ; that the company we met 
there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged 
to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going 
on, on the stage — because a word lost would have been a 
chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up. With 
such reflections we consoled our pride then ; and I ap- 
peal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally with 
less attention and accommodation than I have done since 



OLD CHINA. 151 

in more expensive situations in the house ? The getting 
in indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient stair- 
cases, was bad enough ; but there was still a law of civility 
to woman recognized to quite as great an extent as we 
ever found in the other passages ; and how a little diffi- 
culty overcome heightened the snug seat and the play 
afterward ! Now we can only pay our money and walk 
in. You can not see, you say, in the galleries now. I 
am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then ; but 
sight and all, I think, is gone with our poverty. 

"There was pleasure in eating strawberries before 
they became quite common — in the first dish of peas, 
while they were yet dear — to have them for a nice sup- 
per, a treat. What treat can we have now ? If we were 
to treat ourselves now — that is, to have dainties a little 
above our means — it would be selfish and wicked. It is 
the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what 
the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat 
— when two people living together, as we have done, 
now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, 
which both like, while each apologizes, and is willing to 
take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see 
no harm in people making much of themselves, in that 
sense of the word ; it may give them a hint how to make 
much of others. But now — what I mean by the word — 
we never do make much of ourselves. None but the 
poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, 
but persons as we were, just above poverty. 

"I know what you were going to say, that it is 
mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet; 
and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first night 
of December to account for our exceedings ; many a long 
face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in 



153 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

contriving to make it out how we had spent so much — 
or that we had n6t spent so much — or that it was im- 
possible we should spend so much next year ; and still 
we found our slender capital decreasing. But then, be- 
twixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort 
or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing 
without that for the future, and the hope that youth 
brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never 
poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in con. 
elusion, with ' lusty brimmers ' (as you used to quote it 
out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton^ as you called him)^ 
we used to welcome in the ' coming guest.' Now we 
have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year — no 
flattering promises about the new year doing better for 
us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, 
that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful 
how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling 
at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had 

conjured up out of a clear income of poor hundred 

pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we 
were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I 
am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were 
to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much 
mend ourselves. That we had so much to struggle with 
as we grew up together, we have reason to be most 
thankful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer. 
"We could never have been what we have been to each 
other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you 
now complain of. The resisting power — those natural 
dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances can 
not straiten — with ns are long since passed away. Com- 
petence to age is supplementary youth — a sorry supple- 



THE CHILD ANGEL: A DREAM. 153 

ment indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We 
must ride where we formerly walked ; live better and 
lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had 
means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet 
could those days return — could you and I once more 
walk our thirty miles a-day — could Bannister and Mrs. 
Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see 
them — could the good old one-shilling gallery days re- 
turn — they are dreams, my cousin, now — but could you 
and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument by 
our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa, 
be once more struggling up those inconvenient staircases, 
pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest 
rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could I once more 
hear those anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious 
Thanh God^ we are safe^ which always followed when 
the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the 
whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — I know not the 
fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I 
would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus 
had, or the great Jew E is supposed to have, to pur- 
chase it. 

" And now do just Took at that merry Chinese little 
waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, 
over the head of that pretty insipid half Madonna-ish 
chit of a lady in that very blue summer-house." 



THE CHILD ANGEL: A DEE AM. 

I CHANGED upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing 
of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I 
had been reading the "Loves of the Angels,"and went 



154 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

to bed with my head full of speculations suggested by 
that extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innu- 
merable conjectures ; and I remember the last waking 
thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was 
a sort of wonder " what could come of it." 

I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could 
scarcely make out — ^but to some celestial region. It 
was not the real heavens neither — ^not the downright 
Bible-heaven — but a kind of fairyland heaven, about 
which a poor human fancy may have leave to sport and 
air itself, I wiU hope, without presumption. 

Methought — what wild things dreams are! — I was 
present — at what would you imagine? — at an angel's 
gossiping. 

Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, 
or whether it came purely of its own head, neither you 
nor I know ; but there lay, sure enough, wrapt in its lit- 
tle cloudy swaddling-bands — a Child Angel. 

Sun-threads — filmy beams— rran through the celestial 
napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the 
winged orders hovered round, watching when the new- 
born should open its yet closed eyes; which, when it 
did, first one, and then the other — with a solicitude and 
apprehension, yet not such as, stained with fear, dims 
the expanding eyelids of mortal infants, but as if to ex- 
plore its path in those its unhereditary palaces — what 
an inextinguishable titter that time spared not celestial 
visages ! Nor wanted there to my seeming — oh the in- 
explicable simpleness of dreams ! — ^bowls of that cheering 

nectar 

.... which mortals caudle call below. 

N'or were wanting faces of female ministrants, stricken 
in years, as it might seem, so dexterous were those heav- 



THE CHILD ANGEL: A DREAM. 155 

enly attendants to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, 
to greet with terrestrial child-rites the young Present 
which earth had made to heaven. 

Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full sym- 
phony as those by which the spheres are tutored, but as 
loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled, 
80 to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears 
of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those 
subdued soundings, the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering 
its rudiments of pinions— but forthwith flagged and was 
recovered into the arms of those full-winged angels. 
And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round in 
heaven— a year in dreams is as a day— continually its 
white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, wanting 
the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its as- 
piring, and fell fluttering— still caught by angel hands— 
for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, be- 
cause its birth was not of the unmixed vigor of heaven. 

And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was 
to be called Ge-Urania, because its production was of 
earth and heaven. 

And it could not taste of death, by reason of its 
adoption into immortal palaces; but it was to know 
weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbe- 
cility ; and it went with a lame gait ; but in its goings it 
exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness. 
Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms, and yearn- 
ings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the 
immortal lame one. 

And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, 
with pain and strife, to their natures (not grief), put 
back their bright intelligences, and reduce their ethereal 
minds, schooling them to degrees and slower processes, 



156 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

so to adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as 
must needs be) of the half-earth-born ; and what intui- 
tive notices they could not repeal (by reason that their 
nature is to know all things at once), the half-heavenly 
novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive 
into its understanding ; so that Humility and Aspiration 
went on even-paced in the instruction of glorious Am- 
phibium. 

But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to 
breathe the air of that super-subtile region, its portion 
was, and is, to be a child for ever. 

And because the human part of it might not press 
into the heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption 
those full-natured angels tended it by turns in the pur- 
lieus of the palace, where were shady groves and rivu- 
lets, like this green earth from which it came : so Love, 
with Voluntary Humility, waited upon the entertain- 
ment of the new adopted. 

And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time 
is nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual 
childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon 
earth, and still goes lame and lovely. 

By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone sitting 
by the grave of the terrestrial Mirzah, whom the angel 
Nadir loved, a Child ; but not the same which I saw in 
heaven. A pensive hue overcasts its lineaments ; never- 
theless, a correspondency is between the child by the 
grave and that celestial orphan whom I saw above ; and 
the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly is a shadow 
or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terres- 
trial. And this correspondency is not to be understood 
but by dreams. 

And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read 



CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 157 

how that once the angel Nadir, heing exiled from his 
place for mortal passion, upspringing on the wings of 
parental love (such power had parental loVe for a mo- 
ment to suspend the else irrevocable law), appeared for 
a brief instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous 
Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew 
him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe 
who goeth lame and lovely ; but Mirzab sleepeth by the 
river Pison. 



CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 

Dehoetatioists from tbe use of strong liquors have 
been the favorite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, 
and have been received with abundance of applause by 
water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, 
the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound 
has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is acknowledged, the 
remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man to 
raise the glass to his head against his will. 'Tis as easy 
as not to steal, not to tell lies. 

Alas ! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false 
witness, have no constitutional tendency. These are 
actions indifferent to them. At the first instance of the 
reformed will, they can be brought off without a mur- 
mur. The itching finger is but a figure in speech, and 
the tongue of the liar can with the same natural delight 
give forth useful truths with which it has been accus- 
tomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when 
a man has commenced sot — 

pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout 



158 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily un- 
touched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name which I 
have written, first learn what the tMng is ; how much 
of compassion, how much of human allowance, thou 
mayest virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation. 
Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under 
so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a 
state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus 
rose not but by a miracle. 

Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. 
But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not 
like climbing a mountain, but going through fire ? what 
if the whole system must undergo a change violent as 
that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some 
insects ? what if a process comparable to flaying alive be 
to be gone through ? Is the weakness ihat sinks under 
such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity 
which clings to other vices, which have induced no con- 
stitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, 
body and soul ? 

I have known one in that state, when he has tried to 
abstain but for one evening — ^though the poisonous po- 
tion had long ceased to bring back its first enchantments, 
though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom 
than brighten it — in the violence of the struggle, and the 
necessity he has felt of getting rid of the present sensa- 
tion at any rate, I have known him to scream out, to 
cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within 
him. 

Why should I hesitate to declare that the man of 
whom I speak is myself ? I have no puling apology to 
make to mankind. I see them all in one way or another 
deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 159 

alone I am accountable for the woe tliat I have brought 
upon it. 

I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads 
and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; 
whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at 
all events, whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a mea- 
sure, can do no worse injury to than just to muddle 
their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them 
this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a 
weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, and 
coming off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade 
them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is 
to a very different description of persons I speak. It is 
to the weak, the nervous ; to those who feel the want of 
some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what 
is no more than^ the ordinary pitch of all around them 
without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such 
must fly the convivial board in the first instance, if they 
do not mean to sell themselves for term of life. 

Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and-twen- 
tieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving school 
to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions 
were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of 
my own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went 
to bed betimes, and the faculties which God had given 
me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me unused. 

About that time I fell in with some companions of a 
difi'erent order. They were men of boisterous spirits, 
sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken, yet seemed to 
have something noble about them. We dealt about the 
wit, or what passes for it after midnight, jovially. Of 
the quality called fancy I certainly possessed a larger 
share than my companions. Encouraged by their ap- 



160 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

plause, I set up for a professed joker ! — I, who of all 
men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in 
addition to the greatest diflSculty which I experience at 
all times of finding words to express my meaning, a nat- 
ural nervous impediment in my speech I 

Eeader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire 
to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tick- 
ling relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort 
of conversation, especially if you find a preternatural 
flow of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle 
and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly 
your greatest destruction. K you can not crush the 
power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake 
for such, divert it, give it some other play. "Write an 
essay, pen a character or description — but not, as I do 
now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. 

To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision 
to foes ; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools ; 
to be esteemed dull when you can not be witty, to be ap- 
plauded for witty when you know you have been dull; 
to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of 
that faculty which no premeditation can give ; to be 
» spurred on to efibrts which end in contempt ; to be set 
on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred ; 
to give pleasure and be paid with squinting malice ; to 
swallow draughts of life-destroying wine which are to 
be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors ; to 
mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness ; to 
waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in 
little inconsiderable drops of drudging applause, are the 
wages of buff'oonery and death. 

Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all con- 
nections which have no solider fastening than this liquid 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 161 

cement, more kind to me than my own taste or pene- 
tration, at length opened ray eyes to the supposed quali- 
ties of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in 
the vices which they introduced, and the habits they in- 
fixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise 
ample retribution for any supposed infideUty that I may 
have been guilty of toward them. 

My next more immediate companions were and are 
persons of such intrinsic and felt worth that, though ac- 
cidentally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to 
me, I do not know that if the thing were to do over 
again, I should have the courage to eschew the mischief 
at the price of forfeiting the benefit. I came to them 
reeking from the steams of my late overheated notions 
of companionship ; and the shghtest fuel which they un- 
consciously afforded was sufficient to feed my old fires 
into a propensity. 

They were no drinkers, but, one from professional 
habits, and another from a custom derived from his 
father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have de- 
vised a more subtle trap to retake a backsliding penitent. 
The transition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire 
to pufiing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like 
cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope 
to commute. He beats us at barter, and when we think 
to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, 'tis odds 
but he puts the trick upon us of two for one. That 
(comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him 
in the end seven worse than himself. 

It were impertinent to carry the reader through all 

the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt 

liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, through 

stronger wine and water, through small punch, to those 

11 



162 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

juggling compositions wMcli, nnder the name of mixed 
liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under 
less and less water continually, until they come next to 
none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to disclose 
the secrets of my Tartarus. 

I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of 
believing me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been 
to me, the drudging service which I have paid, the slav- 
ery which I have vowed to it. How, when I have re- 
solved to quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has started 
up ; how it has put on personal claims and made the de- 
mands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casu- 
ally in a book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the 
chimney-corner of some inn in "Joseph Andrews," or 
Piscator in the " Complete Angler " breaks his fast upon 
the morning pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sae- 
rum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of 
weeks. How a pipe was ever iu my midnight path be- 
fore me, till the vision forced me to realize it ; how then 
its ascending vapors curled, its fragrance lulled, and the 
thousand delicious ministerings conversant about it, em- 
ploying every faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How 
from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace 
it turned to a negative relief, thence to a restlessness and 
dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. How, even 
now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all its 
dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it be- 
yond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone 

Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of 
their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet 
the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so 
obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from 
this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 163 

sucli a bondage is it, which, in spite of protesting friends, 
•a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down 
many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to good- 
ness, to his pipe and his pot ? 

I have seen a print after Oorreggio, in which three 
female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast 
bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, 
Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance 
at the same instant of time is applying a snake to his 
side. In his face is feeble delight, the recollection of 
past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid 
enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Syba- 
ritic effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of 
the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the 
suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the 
former, remorse preceding action — all this represented 
in one point of time. When I saw this, I admired the 
wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, 
I wept, because I thought of my own condition. 

Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. 
The waters have gone over me. But out of the black 
depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those 
who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the 
youth, to whom the flavor of his first wine is dehcious as 
the opening scenes of life or the entering upon some 
newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and 
be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a 
man shall feel himself going down a precipice with open 
eyes and a passive will ; to see his destruction and have 
no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way em- 
anating from himself; to perceive all goodness emptied 
out of him, and yet not to be able to forget a time when 
it was otherwise ; to bear about the piteous spectacle of 



164 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

his own self-ruins : could he see my fevered eye, feverish 
with last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for this 
night's repetition of the folly ; could he feel the body of 
the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and 
feebler outcry to be delivered — ^it were enough to make 
him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the 
pride of its mantling temptation ; to make him clasp his 
teeth, 

.... and not undo 'em 
To suffer wet damnation to run thro' 'em. 

Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if so- 
briety be that fine thing yon would have us to under- 
stand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred 
to that state of heated excitement which you describe 
and deplore, what hinders in your instance that you do 
not return to those habits from which you would induce 
others never to swerve? If the blessing be worth pre- 
serving, is it not worth recovering ? 

Eecovering I Oh, if a wish could transport me back 
to those days of youth, when a draught from the next 
clear spring could slake any heats which summer suns 
and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, 
how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the 
drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit ! In my 
dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purl- 
ing over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach 
rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes 
me sick and faint. 

But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence 
and the excess which kills you ? For your sake, reader, 
and that you may never attain to my experience, with 
pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none — 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 165 

none that I can find. In my stage of habit (I speak not 
of habits less confirmed — for some of them I believe the 
advice to be most prudential), in the stage which I have 
reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient 
to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic 
sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken none at all. The 
pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I 
had rather the reader should believe on my credit than 
know from his own trial. He will come to know it, 
whenever he shall arrive in that state in which, paradoxi- 
cal as it may appear, reason shall only msit him through 
intoxication; for it is a fearful truth that the intellectual 
faculties, by repeated acts of intemperance, may be driv- 
en from their orderly sphere of action, their clear day- 
light ministries, until they shall be brought at last to 
depend for the faint manifestation of their departing en- 
ergies upon the returning periods of the fatal madness to 
which they owe their devastation. The drinking man is 
never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil 
is so far his good.* 

Behold me then, in the robust period of life, reduced 
to imbecility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and 
the profits which I have derived from the midnight cup. 

Twelve years ago I was possessed of a healthy frame 
of mind and body. I was never strong, but I think my 
constitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from 

* When poor M painted his last picture, with a pencil in 

one trembling hand and a glass of brandy and water in the other, 
his fingers owed the comparative steadiness with which they 
were enabled to go througli their task in an imperfect manner, to 
a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the 
general effect of which had shaken both them and him so ter- 
ribly. 



166 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I 
scarce knew what it was to ail anything. Now, except 
when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never 
free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach 
which are so much worse to bear than any definite pains 
or aches. 

At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the 
morning, summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and 
seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or 
some piece of a song to welcome the new-born day. 
Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretching 
out the hours of recumbence to their last possible extent, 
is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, 
with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never 
awaked. 

Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, 
the trouble, and obscure perplexity of an ill dream. In 
the daytime I stumble upon dark mountains. 

Business, which, though never very particularly 
adapted to my nature, yet as something of necessity to 
be gone through, and therefore best undertaken with 
cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of 
alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes me. I fancy 
all sorts of discouragements, and am ready to give up an 
occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing con- 
ceit of incapacity. The slightest commission given me 
by a friend, or any small duty which I have to perform 
for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, etc., haunts 
me as a labor impossible to be got through. So much 
the springs of action are broken. 

The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse 
with mankind. I dare not promise that a friend's honor 
or his cause would be safe in my keeping, if I were put 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 167 

to the expense of any manly resolution in defending it. 
So much the springs of moral action are deadened within 
me. 

My favorite occupations in times past now cease to 
entertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for 
ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my 
condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely 
any attempt at connection of thought, which is now diffi- 
cult to me. 

The noble passages which formerly delighted me in 
history or poetic fiction, now only draw a few weak 
tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature 
seems to sink before anything great and admirable. 

I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause or 
none. It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds 
to a sense of shame and a general feeling of deteriora- 
tion. 

These are some of the instances, concerning which I 
can say with truth that it was not always so with me. 

Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further ? 
or is this disclosure sufficient ? 

I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to 
consult by Confessions. I know not whether I shall be 
laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I com- 
mend them to the reader's attention, if he find his own 
case any way touched. I have told him what I am come 
to. Let him stop in time. 



168 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 

That a tully is always a coward. — This ax'iom con- 
tains a principle of compensation, whicli disposes ns to 
admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to 
dictionaries and definitions. We should more willingly 
fall in with this popular language, if we did not find 
brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valor in 
the same vocabulary. The comic writers, with their 
poetical justice, have contributed not a little to mislead 
us upon this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed 
and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonder- 
fully diverting. Some people's share of animal spirits 
is notoriously low and defective. It has not strength to 
raise a vapor, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable 
bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no part of 
valor. The truest courage with them is that which is 
the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one of these 
silent heroes with the swagger of real life, and his confi- 
dence in the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do 
not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest, in- 
offensive deportment does not necessarily imply valor ; 
neither does the absence of it justify us in denying that 
quality. Hickman wanted modesty — we do not mean 
Mm of Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage? 
Even the poets — ^upon whom this equitable distribution 
of qualities should be most binding — have thought it 
agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occa- 
sion. Harapha, in the " Agonistes," is indeed a bully 
upon the received notions. Milton has made him at 
once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzoi*, 
in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him — 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 169 

and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into 
this kind of character than either of his predecessors. 
He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero 
a sort of dimidiate preeminence : " Bully Dawson kicked 
by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully 
Dawson." This was true distributive justice. 

That ill-gotten gain never prospers. — The weakest 
part of mankind have this saying commonest in their 
mouth. It is the trite consolation administered to the 
easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money 
or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no 
good. But the rogues of this world — ^the prudenter part 
of them, at least — know better ; and if the observation 
had been as true as it is old, they would not have failed 
by this time to discover it. They have pretty sharp 
distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. ' ' Light- 
ly come, lightly go," is a proverb which they can very 
well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the 
losers. They do not always find manors got by rapine 
or chicanery insensibly to melt away, as the poets will 
have it ; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from 
the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land alienated 
to lay uses was formerly denounced to have this slippery 
quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck 
so fast, that the denunciators have been fain to postpone 
the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. 

That a man must not laugh at his own jest— The 
severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self- 
denial of poor human nature ! This is to expect a gen- 
tleman to give a treat without partaking of it ; to sit 
esurient at his own table, and commend the flavor of his 
venison upon the absurd strength of his never touching 



170 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

it himseK. On tlie contrary, we love to see a wag taste 
Ms own joke to his party ; to watcli a quirk or merry 
conceit flickering upon the lips some seconds before the 
tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and 
racy, begotten of the occasion — if he that utters it never 
thought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled 
with it ; and any suppression of such complacence we 
hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to 
imply, but that your company is weak or foolish enough 
to be moved by an image or a fancy that shall stir you 
not at all, or but faintly ? This is exactly the humor of 
the fine gentleman in " Mandeville," who, while he daz- 
zles his guests with the display of some costly toy, affects 
himself to see " nothing considerable in it." 

That such a one shows his breeding ; that it is easy to 
perceive he is no gentleman. — A speech from the poorest 
sort of people, which always indicates that the party 
vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they 
deny is that which galls and exasperates them to use 
this language. The forbearance with which it is usually 
received is a proof what interpretation the bystander 
sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are 
the phrases with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply 
one another more grossly : £fe is a poor creature; he has 
not a rag to cover , etc. ; though this last, we con- 
fess, is more frequently applied by females to females. 
They do not perceive that the satire glances upon them- 
selves. A poor man, of all things in the world, should 
not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there no 
other topics— as, to tell him his father was hanged — ^his° 

sister made a -, without exposing a secret which 

should be kept snug between them, and doing an affront 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 171 

to tlie order to which they have the honor equally to 
belong ? All this while they do not see how the wealth- 
ier man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. 

That the poor copy the vices of the rich. — A smooth 
text to the letter ; and preached from the pulpit, is sure 
of a docile audience from the pews hned with satin. It 
is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told 
that he — and not perverse nature, as the homilies would 
make us imagine — is the true cause of all the irregulari- 
ties in his parish. This is striking at the root of free 
will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any 
sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes 
to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper 
classes is to derive itself from no higher principle than 
the apprehension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we 
beg leave to discharge them from all squeamishness on 
that score : they may even take their fill of pleasures 
where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, 
hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of in- 
vention, but it can trade upon the staple of its own vice, 
without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not 
quite such servile imitators as they take them for. Some 
of them are very clever artists in their way. Here and 
there we find an original. Who taught the poor to steal, 
to pilfer? They do not go to the great for schoolmasters 
in these faculties, surely. It is well if in some vices 
they allow us to be — no copyists. In no other sense is it 
true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be 
said to taJce after their masters and mistresses, when 
they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. If the 
master, from indisposition or some other cause, neglect 
his food, the servant dines notwithstanding. 



172 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

"Oh, but (some will say) the force of example is 
great." We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this 
head, that she would put up with the calls of the most 
impertinent visitor rather that let her servant say she 
was not at home, for fear of teaching her maid to tell 
an untruth ; and this in the very face of the fact, which 
she knew well enough, that the wench was one of the 
greatest liars upon the earth without teaching ; so much 
so that her mistress possibly never heard two words of 
consecutive truth from her in her life. But nature must 
go for nothing : example must be everything. This liar 
in grain, who never opened her mouth without a lie, 
must be guarded against a remote inference, which she 
(pretty casuist!) might possibly draw from a form of 
words — hterally false, but essentially deceiving no one — 
that under some circumstances a fib might not be so ex- 
ceedingly sinful — a fiction, too, not at all in her own 
way, or one that she could be suspected of adopting, for 
few servant-wenches care to be denied to visitors. 

This word exam'ple reminds us of another fine word 
which is in use upon these occasions — encouragement. 
" People in our sphere must not be thought to give en- 
couragement to such proceedings." To such a frantic 
height is this principle capable of being carried, that we 
have known individuals who have thought it within the 
scope of their influence to sanction despair and give eclat 
to — suicide. A domestic in the family of a county mem- 
ber lately deceased, from love, or some unknown cause, 
cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor fellow 
was otherwise much loved and respected ; and great in- 
terest was used in his behalf, upon his recovery, that he 
might be permitted to retain his place ; his word being 
first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 173 

promise for him, that the like should never happen again. 
His master was inclinable to keep him, but his mistress 
thought otherwise ; and John in the end was dismissed, 
her ladyship declaring that she "could not think of 
encouraging any such doings in the county." 

That enough is as good as a feast. — Not a man, wo- 
man, or child, in ten miles round Guildhall, who really 
believes this saying. The inventor of it did not believe 
it himself. It was made in revenge by somebody who 
was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-scrag-of- 
mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the palate, which 
knows better things. If nothing else could be said for a 
feast, this is sufficient, that from the superflux there is 
usually something left for the next day. Morally inter- 
preted, it belongs to a class of proverbs which have a 
tendency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast are 
those notable observations, that money is not health; 
riches can not purchase everything ; the metaphor which 
makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which 
traces fine clothing to the sheep's back, and denounces 
pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster. Hence, 
too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres — a sophistry 
so barefaced, that even the literal sense of it is true only 
in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage 
saws assuming to inculcate content, we verily believe to 
have been the invention of some cunning borrower, who 
had designs upon the purse of his wealthier neighbor, 
which he could only hope to carry by force of these ver- 
bal jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of 
the artful metonyme which envelops it, and the trick is 
apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhila- 
rating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of see- 



174 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

ing foreign countries, independence, heart's-ease, a man's 
own time to himself, are not muck — however we may be 
pleased to scandalize with that appellation the faithful 
metal that provides them for us. 

Of two disputants the warmest is generally in the 
wrong. — Our experience would lead us to quite an op- 
posite conclusion. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth : 
but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of aman'o 
own conviction of the rectitude of that which he main- 
tains. Coolness is as often the result of an unprincipled 
indifference to truth or falsehood, as of a sober confi- 
dence in a man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more 
insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philoso- 
phic temper. There is little Titubus, the stammering 
law-stationer in Lincoln's Inn : we have seldom known 
this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where 
we were were not convinced he had the best of it, if his 
tongue would but fairly have seconded him. "When he 
has been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour 
together, writhing and laboring to be delivered of the 
point of dispute— the very gist of the controversy knock- 
ing at his teeth, which like some obstinate iron grating 
still obstructed its deliverance — his puny frame convulsed 
and face reddening all over at an unfairness in the logic 
which he wanted articulation to expose, it has moved 
our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, 
that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by 
merely laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, 
and desiring him to be calm (your tall disputants have 
always the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry the 
argument clean from him in the opinion of all the by- 
standers, who have gone away clearly convinced that 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 175 

Titubus must have been in the wrong, because he was in 

a passion ; and that Mr. , meaning his opponent, is 

one of the fairest, and at the same time one of the most 
dispassionate arguers breathing. 

That verbal allusions are not wit^ hecatise they will not 
dear a translation. — The same might be said of the witti- 
est local allusions. A custom is sometimes as difficult to 
explain to a foreigner as a pun. What would become of 
a great part of the wit of the last age if it were tried by 
this test? How would certain topics, as aldermanitj, 
cuckoldry, have sounded to a Terentian auditory, though 
Terence himself had been alive to translate them? Sen- 
ator urbanus with Curruca to boot for a synonyme, 
would but faintly have done the business. Words, in- 
volving notions, are hard enough to render ; it is too much 
to expect us to translate a sound, and give an elegant 
version to a jingle. The Virgilian harmony is not trans- 
latable, but by substituting harmonious sounds in another 
language for it. To Latinize a pun, we must seek a pun 
in Latin that will answer to it ; as, to give an idea of the 
double endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a 
similar practice in the old monkish doggerel. Dennis, 
the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient or modern times, 
professes himself highly tickled with the " a stick," chim- 
ing to " ecclesiastic." Yet what is this but a species of 
pun, a verbal consonance ? 

That the worst puns are the hest. — ^If by worst be only 
meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree to it. 
A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. 
It is a pistol let off at the ear, not a feather to tickle the 
intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon man- 
ners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not 



176 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by 
the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or 
prove defective in one leg — all the better. A pun may 
easily be too curious and artificial. Who has not at one 
time or other been at a party of professors (himself per- 
haps an old offender in that line), where, after ringing a 
round of the most ingenious conceits, every man con- 
tributing his shot, and some there the most expert shoot- 
ers of the day ; after making a poor word run the gant- 
let till it is ready to drop ; after hunting and winding it 
through all the possible ambages of similar sounds ; after 
squeezing and hauling and tugging at it, till the very milk 
of it will not yield a drop further — suddenly some obscure, 
unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never 'prentice 
to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed 
over, as we do by a known poor man when a money-sub- 
scription is going round, no one calling upon him for his 
quota, has all at once come out with something so whim- 
sical, yet so pertinent — so brazen in its pretensions, 
yet so impossible to be denied — so exquisitely good, and 
so deplorably bad at the same time — that it has proved 
a Eobin Hood's shot ? Anything ulterior to that is de- 
spaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting 
it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. 
This species of wit is the better for not being perfect in 
all its parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses in 
naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, 
the less hold it has upon some other faculties. The puna 
which are most entertaining are those which will least 
bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded 
with a sort of stigma in one of Swift's Miscellanies : 

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carry- 
ing a hare through the streets, accosts him with this ex- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 177 

traordinary question: ''Prithee, friend, is that thy own 
hare, or a wig ? " 

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man 
might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defense of 
it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The 
quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new 
turn given by a little false pronunciation to a very com- 
mon, though not a very courteous inquiry. Put by one 
gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have 
been vapid ; to the mistress of the house, it would have 
shown much less wit than rudeness. We must take in 
the totality of time^ place, and person : the pert look of 
the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled 
porter ; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying 
on with his burden ; the innocent though rather abrupt 
tendency of the first member of the question, with the 
utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second ; the 
place — a public street — not favorable to frivolous inves- 
tigations ; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry 
(the common question) invidiously transferred to the de- 
rivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire ; 
namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the 
good things which they carry, they being in most coun- 
tries considered rather as the temporary trustees than 
owners of such dainties — which the fellow was beginning 
to understand ; but then the wig again comes in, and he 
can make nothing of it ; all put together constitute a 
picture. Hogarth could have made it intelligible on 
canvas. 

Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very 

bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding 

member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes the 

surprise. The same person shall cry up for admirable 

12 



178 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

the cold quibble from Yirgil about tbe broken Cremona,* 
because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves nothing 
to the imagination. We venture to call it cold ; because 
of thousands who have admired it, it would be diflScult 
to find one who has heartily chuckled at it. As appeal- 
ing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty 
aside), we must pronounce it a monument of curious 
felicity. But as some stories applied by Swift to a lady's 
dress, or mantua as it was then termed, coming in con- 
tact with one of those fiddles called Cremonas, are said 
to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be 
asserted of this biverbal allusion, that it is too good to be 
natural. One can not help suspecting that the incident 
was invented to fit the line. It would have been better 
had it been less perfect. Like some Yirgilian hemistichs, 
it has suffered by filling up. The nimium Vicina was 
enough in conscience ; the Oremonm afterward loads it. 
It is, in fact, a double pun, and we have always observed 
that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. 
When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to 
follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a second 
time ; or, perhaps, the mind of man (with reverence be 
it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at 
a time. The impression, to be forcible, must be simul- 
taneous and undivided. 

That handsome is that handsome does. — Those who 
use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. Oonrady. 

The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from 
the celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this 
heavenly light, she informs with corresponding charac- 

* Mantua vse miserse nimium Vicina Cremonee. 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 179 

ters the fleshly tenement which she chooses, and frames 
to herself a suitable mansion. 

All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, 
in her preexistent state, was no great judge of architec- 
ture. 

To the same effect, in a Hymn in honor of Beauty, 
divine Spenser, platonizing, sings: 

"Every spirit as it is more pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
For of the soul the body form doth take : 
For soul is form and doth the body make." 

But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady. 

These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philoso- 
phy ; for here, in his very next stanza but one, is a sav- 
ing clause, which throws us all out again, and leaves us 
as much to seek as ever : 

" Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind 
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd. 
Either by chance, against the course of kind, 
Or through unaptness in the substance found. 
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, 
That will not yield unto her form's direction, 
But is perform'd with some foul imperfection." 

From which it would follow that Spenser had seen 
somebody like Mrs. Conrady. 

The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — 
must have stumbled upon one of these untoward taber- 
nacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious commod- 



180 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

ity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls it, no gentle 
mind — and sure hers is one of the gentlest — ever had to 
deal with. 

Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inexplicable, 
we mean, but by this modification of the theory — we 
have come to a conclusion that, if one must be plain, it 
is better to be plain all over, than, amidst a tolerable 
residue of features, to hang out one that shall be excep- 
tionable. No one can say of Mrs. Oonrady's counte- 
nance that it would be better if she had but a nose. It 
is impossible to pull her to pieces in this manner. "We 
have seen the most malicious beauties of her own sex 
baffled in the attempt at a selection. The tout-enserrible 
defies particularizing. It is too complete — too consis- 
tent, as we may say— to admit of these invidious reserva- 
tions. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out here 
a lip and there a chin, out of the collected ugliness of 
Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. 
We challenge the minutest connoisseur to cavil at any 
part or parcel of the countenance in question ; to say 
that this or that is improperly placed. "We are con- 
vinced that true ugliness, no less than is affirmed of true 
beauty, is the result of harmony. Like that, too, it 
reigns without a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. 
Oonrady without pronouncing her to be the plainest 
woman that he ever met with in the course of his life. 
The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her 
face is an era in your existence ever after. You are glad 
to have seen it — like Stonehenge. No one can pretend 
to forget it. No one ever apologized to her for meet- 
ing her in the street on such a day and not knowing 
her : the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mis- 
take her for another. Nobody can say of her, " I think 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 181 

I have seen that face somewhere, but I can not call to 
mind where." You must remember that in such a par- 
lor it first struck you — ^like a bust. You wondered 
where the owner of the house picked it up. You won- 
dered more when it began to move its lips — so mildly, 
too ! No one ever thought of asking her to sit for her 
picture. Lockets are for remembrance ; and it would be 
clearly superfluous to hang an image at your heart, 
which, once seen, can never be out of it. It is not a 
mean face either ; its entire originality precludes that. 
Neither is it of that order of plain faces which improve 
upon acquaintance. Some very good but ordinary peo- 
ple, by an unwearied perseverance in good oflSces, put a 
cheat upon our eyes, juggle our senses of their natural 
impressions, and set us upon discovering good indica- 
tions in a countenance which at first sight promised no- 
thing less. We detect gentleness, which had escaped us, 
lurking about an under lip. But when Mrs. Conrady 
has done you a service, her face remains the same; 
when she has done you a thousand, and you know that 
she is ready to double the number, still it is that indi- 
vidual face. Neither can you say of it that it would be 
a good face if it were not marked by the small-pox, a 
compliment which is always more admissive than excu- 
satory ; for either Mrs. Conrady never had the small- 
pox, or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon 
its own merits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her 
token ; that which she is known by. 

That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple 
are models of the genteel style of writing. — ^We should* 
prefer saying, of the lordly a/nd the gentlemanly. No- 
thing can be more unlike than the inflated finical rhap- 
sodies of Shaftesbury, and the plain natural chit-chat of 



182 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

Temple. The man of rank is discernible in both writers ; 
but in the one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the other 
it stands out offensively. The peer seems to have writ- 
ten with his coronet on, and his Earl's mantle before 
him; the commoner in his elbow-chair and undress. 
What can be more pleasant than the way in which the 
retired statesman peeps out in his essays, penned by the 
latter in his delightful retreat at Shene? They scent 
of Nimeguen and the Hague. Scarce an authority is 
quoted under an ambassador. Don Francisco de Melo, 
a *' Portugal Envoy in England," tells him it was fre- 
quent in his country for men spent with age and other 
decays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two 
of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after 
their arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of 
twenty or thirty years or more, by the force of that 
vigor they recovered with that remove. " Whether such 
an effect " (Temple beautifully adds) " might grow from 
the air or the fruits of that climate, or by approaching 
nearer the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, 
when their natural heat was so far decayed, or whether 
the piecing out of an old man's life were worth the pains, 
I can not tell : perhaps the play is not worth the can- 
dle." Monsieur Pompone, " French Ambassador in his 
(Sir William's) time at the Hague," certifies him that in 
his life he had never heard of any man in France that 
arrived at a hundred years of age ; a limitation of life 
which, the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of 
* their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper 
and humor as disposes them to more pleasures of all 
kinds than in any other countries ; and moralizes upon 
the matter very sensibly. The "late Eobert, Earl of 
Leicester," furnishes him with a story of a Countess of 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 183 

Desmond, married out of Ecgland in Edward IV.'s time, 
and who lived far in King James's reign. The "same 
noble person " gives him an account how such a year, in 
the same reign, there went about the country a set of 
morrice-dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a 
Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe ; and how these 
twelve, one with another, made up twelve hundred years. 
" It was not so mucb " (says Temple) " that so many in 
one small county (Hertfordshire) should live to that age, 
as that they should be in vigor and in humor to travel 
and to dance." Monsieur Zulichem, one of his " col- 
leagues at the Hague," informs him of a cure for the gout, 
which is confirmed by another "Envoy," Monsieur Ser- 
inchamps, in that town, who had tried it. Old Prince 
Maurice of Nassau recommends to him the use of ham- 
mocks in that complaint ; having been allured to sleep, 
while suffering under it himself, by the " constant motion 
or swinging of those airy beds." Count Egmont, and 
the Khinegrave, who " was killed last summer before 
Maestricht," impart to him their experiences. 

But the rank of the writer is never more innocently 
disclosed than where lie takes for granted the compli- 
ments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees. For the taste 
and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly 
say that the French, who have eaten his peaches and 
grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally con- 
cluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in 
France on this side Fontainebleau, and the first as good 
as any they have eaten in Gascony. Italians have agreed 
his Avhite figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, 
which is the earlier kind of white fig there ; for "in the 
later kind and the blue, we can not come near the warm 
climates, no more than in the Frontignao or Muscat 



184 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

grape." His orange trees, too, are as large as any lie 
saw when lie was .young in France, except those of Fon- 
tainebleau ; or what he has seen since in the Low Coun- 
tries, except some very old ones of the Prince of Orange's. 
Of grapes he had the honor of bringing over four sorts 
into England, which he enumerates, and supposes that 
they are all by this time pretty common among some 
gardeners in his neighborhood, as well as several persons 
of quality ; for he ever thought all things of this kind 
"the commoner they are made the better." The garden 
pedantry with which he asserts that 'tis to little purpose 
to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, 
hardly, he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the fur- 
thest northwards, and praises the " Bishop of Munster at 
Oosevelt," for attempting nothing beyond cherries in that 
cold climate, is equally pleasant and in character. " I 
may, perhaps " (he thus ends his sweet Garden Essay 
with a passage worthy of Cowley), " be allowed to know 
something of this trade, since I h^ve so long allowed my- 
self to be good for nothing else, which few men will do, 
or enjoy their gardens, without often looking abroad to 
see how other matters play, what motions in the state, 
and what invitations they may hope for into other scenes. 
For my own part, as the country life, and this part of it 
more particularly, were the inclination of my youth it- 
self, so they are the pleasure of my age ; and I can truly 
say that, among many great employments that have fall- 
en to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of 
them, but have often endeavored to escape from them 
into the ease and freedom of a private scene, where a 
man may go his own way and his own pace, in the com- 
mon paths and circles of life. The measure of choosing 
well is whether a man likes what he has chosen, which, 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 185 

I thank God, has befallen me ; and though, among the 
follies of my life, building and planting have not been 
the least, and have cost me more than I have the confi- 
dence to own, yet they have been fully recompensed by 
the sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where, 
since my resolution taken of never entering again into 
any public employments, I have passed five years with- 
out ever once going to town, though I am almost in sight 
of it, and have a house there always ready to receive me. 
Nor has this been any sort of affectation, as some have 
thought it, but a mere want of desire or humor to make 
so small a remove ; for when I am in this corner, I can 
truly say with Horace, Me quoties reficit, etc. 

' Me when the cold Digentian stream revives, 
What does my friend believe I think or ask ? 
Let me yet less possess, so I may live, 
Whate'er of life remains, unto myself. 
May I have books enough, and one year's store, 
Not to depend upon each doubtful hour ; 
This is enough of mighty Jove to pray, 
Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.' " 

The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy 
copy. On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly 
subordinate to nature and tenderness, has seduced him 
into a string of felicitous antitheses — which, it is obvious 
to remark, have been a model to Addison and succeeding 
essayists. " Who would not be covetous, and. with rea- 
son," he says, " if health could be purchased with gold? 
Who not ambitious, if it were at the command of power, 
or restored by honor ? But, alas 1 a white staft' will not 
help gouty feet to walk better than a common cane; nor 
a blue riband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The 



186 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes 
instead of curing them ; and an aching head will be no 
more eased by wearing a crown than a common night- 
cap." 

In a far better style, and more accordant with his 
own humor of plainness, are the concluding sentences of 
his "Discourse upon Poetry." Temple took a part in 
the controversy about the ancient and the modern learn- 
ing ; and, with that partiality so natural and so graceful 
in an old man, whose state engagements had left him 
little leisure to look into modern productions, while his 
retirement gave him occasion to look back upon the clas- 
sic studies of his youth, decided in favor of the latter. 
"Certain it is," he says, "that, whether the fierceness 
of the Gothic humors or noise of their perpetual wars 
frightened it away, or that the unequal mixture of the 
modern languages would not bear it — the great heights 
and excellency both of poetry and music fell with the 
Eoman learning and empire, and have never since recov- 
ered the admiration and applauses that before attended 
them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must 
be confessed to be the softest and the sweetest, the most 
general and most innocent amusements of common time 
and life. They still find room in the courts of princes 
and the cottages of shepherds. They serve to revive 
and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to 
allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of 
the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects 
are of equal use to human life ; for the mind of man is like 
the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor 
the voyager in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both 
when a little agitated by gentle gales ; and so the mind, 
when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 187 

know very well tliat many who pretend to be wise by 
the force of being grave, are apt to despise both poetry 
and music, as toys and trifles too light for the use or en- 
tertainment of serious men. But whoever find them- 
selves wholly insensible to their charms would, I think, 
do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of reproach- 
ing their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their 
natures, if not of their understandings, into question. 
While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and 
request of these two entertainments will do so too ; and 
happy those that content themselves with these, or any 
other so easy and so innocent, and do not trouble the 
world or other men because they can not be quiet them- 
selves, though nobody hurts them." " When all is done " 
(he concludes), " human life is at the greatest and the 
best but like a froward child, that must be played with, 
and humored a little, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, 
and then the care is over." 

TJiat Jiome is home though it is never so homely. — Two 
homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes : the home 
of the very poor man, and another which we shall speak 
to presently. Crowded places of cheap entertainment, and 
the benches of alehouses, if they could speak, might bear 
mournful testimony to the first of our assertions. To 
them the very poor man resorts for an image of the home 
which he can not find at home. For a starved grate, and 
a scanty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the nat- 
ural heat in the fingers of so many shivering children 
with their mother, he finds in the depth of winter always 
a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer 
by. Instead of the clamors of a wife, made gaunt by 
famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond 



188 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

the merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He 
has companions, which his home denies him, for the 
very poor man has no visitors. He can look into the 
goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. At 
home there are no politics stirring, but the domestic. All 
interests, real or imaginary, aU topics that should expand 
the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy with 
general existence, are crushed in the absorbing consider- 
ation of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond 
the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. 
At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a 
show of plenty; and while he cooks his lean scrap of 
butcher's meat before the common bars, or munches his 
humbler cold viands, his relishing bread and cheese with 
an onion, m a corner, where no one reflects upon his 
poverty, he has a sight of the substantial joint providing 
for the landlord and his family. He takes an interest in 
the dressing of it ; and while he assists in removing the 
trivet from the fire, he feels that there is such a thing as 
beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at 
home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. 
But what wife and what children? Prosperous men, 
who object to this desertion, image to themselves some 
clean contented family like that which they go home to. 
But look at the countenance of the poor wife who fol- 
lows and persecutes her goodman to the door of the pub- 
lic house, which he is about to enter, when something 
like shame would restrain him if stronger misery did not 
induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground by 
want, in which every cheerful, every conversable linea- 
ment has been long effaced by misery — ^is that a face to 
stay at home with ? Is it more a woman, or a wild cat? 
Alas ! it is the face of the wife of his youth that once 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 189 

smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. "What com- 
forts can it share ? what burdens can it lighten ? Oh, 'tis 
a fine thing to talk of the humble meal shared together ! 
But what if there be no bread in the cupboard ? The in- 
nocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a 
man's poverty. But the children of the very poor do 
not prattle. It is none of the least frightful features in 
that condition, that there is no childishness in its dwell- 
ings. Poor people, said a sensible nurse to us once, do 
not bring up their children ; they drag them up. The 
little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in their 
hovel is transformed betimes into a premature reflect- 
ing person. No one has time to dandle it, no one 
thinks it worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss 
it up and down, to humor it. There is none to kiss 
away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It 
has been prettily said that "a babe is fed with milk 
and praise." But the aliment of this poor babe was 
thin, unnourishing ; the return to its little baby -tricks, 
and efforts to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objur- 
gation. It never had a toy, or knew what a coral meant. 
It grew up without the lullaby of nurses ; it was a stran- 
ger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting 
novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand 
contrivance to divert the child ; the prattled nonsense 
(best sense to it), the wise impertinences, the wholesome 
lies, the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present 
sufferings, and awakens the passion of young wonder. It 
was never sung to ; no one ever told to it a tale of the 
nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as it hap- 
pened. It had no young dreams. It broke at once into 
the iron realities of life. A child exists not for the very 
poor as any o eject of dalliance ; it is only another mouth 



190 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to la- 
bor. It is the rival, till it can be the cooperator, for 
food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diver- 
sion, his solace ; it never makes him young again, with 
recalling his young times. The children of the very poor 
have no young times. It makes the very heart bleed to 
overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman 
and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor in 
a condition rather above the squalid beings which we 
have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery 
books, of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the 
promised sight or play ; of praised sufficiency at school. 
It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, 
or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should 
be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are 
marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It 
has come to be a woman, before it was a child. It has 
learned to go to market ; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, 
it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it nev- 
er prattles. Had we not reason to say that the home of 
the very poor is no home ? 

There is yet another home, which we are constrained 
to deny to be one. It has a larder, which the home of 
the poor man wants ; its fireside conveniences, of which 
the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. 
It is the house of a man that is infested with many vis- 
itors. May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we 
deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at 
times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof! It is 
not of guests that we complain, but of endless, purpose- 
less visitants ; droppers in, as they are called. We some- 
times wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very 
error of the position of our lodging ; its horoscopy was 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 191 

ill calculated, being just situate in a medium — a plaguy- 
suburban mid-space — fitted to catch idlers from town or 
country. We are older than we were, and age is easily 
put out of its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to 
reckon upon, and we can not brook to see them drop in 
endlessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life, 
to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the 
refreshing sleep of the day. Oh, the comfort of sitting 
down heartily to an old foho, and thinking surely that 
the next hour or two will be your own — and the misery 
of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who 
is come to tell you that he is just come from hearing Mr. 
Irving ! What is that to you ? Let him go home and digest 
what the good man said to him. You are at your chapel 
in your oratory. The growing infirmities of age manifest 
themselves in nothing more strongly than in an inveterate 
dislike of interruption. The thing which we are doing, 
we wish to be permitted to do. We have neither much 
knowledge nor devices ; but there are fewer in the place 
to which we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our 
way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we 
had vast reversions in time future ; we are reduced to a 
present pittance, and obliged to economize in that article. 
We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. 
We can not bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and 
fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter our good 
time with a friend, who gives us in exchange his own. 
Herein is the distinction between the genuine guest and 
the visitant. This latter takes your good time, and gives 
you his bad in exchange. The guest is domestic to you 
as your good cat or household bird ; the visitant is your 
fly, that flaps in at your window, and out again, leaving 
nothing but a sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. 



192 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily. "We 
can not concoct our food with interruptions. Our chief 
meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we 
can eat before a guest, and never understood what the rel- 
ish of public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor 
digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming 
in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a punctual 
generation who time their calls to the precise commence- 
ment of your dining hour — not to eat, but to see you eat. 
Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that 
we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show 
their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment 
you have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar 
compassionate sneer, with which they " hope that they 
do not interrupt your studies." Though they flutter off 
the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the 
nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone 
of the book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and, with 
Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if 
the effect of intrusion were simply coextensive with its 
presence, but it mars all the good hours afterward. These 
scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not 
hastily. " It is a prostitution of the bravery of friend- 
ship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, " to spend it upon 
impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their 
families, but can never ease my loads." This is the se- 
cret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls : 
they too have homes, which are no homes. 

That we must not look a gift horse in the mouth — ^nor 
a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we have 
more delicacy than to do either ; but some faces spare us 
the trouble of these dental inquiries. And what if the 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 193 

beast, which my friend would force upon my acceptance, 
prove upon the face of it a sorry Eosinante, a lean, ill- 
favored jade, whom no gentleman could think of setting 
up in his stables ? Must I, rather than not be obliged to 
my friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or Light- 
foot ? A horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a 
right to palm his spavined article upon us for good ware. 
An equivalent is expected in either case ; and, with my 
own good will, I would no more be cheated out of my 
thanks than out of my money. Some people have a 
knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to en- 
gage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for 
nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this humor of never 
refusing a present to the very point of absurdity — if it 
were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much mis- 
taken delicacy and real good nature. Not an apartment 
in his fine house (and he has a true taste in household 
decorations), but is stuffed up with some preposterous 
print or mirror — the worst adapted to his panels that 
may be — the presents of his friends that know his weak- 
ness; while his noble Vandykes are displaced, to make 
room for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched ar- 
tist of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned 
upon his hands for bad likenesses, finds his account in 
bestowing them here gratis. The good creature has not 
the heart to mortify the painter at the expense of an 
honest refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at 
the same time) to see him sitting in his dining-parlor, 
surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to God knows 
whom, while the true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of 
his own honorable family, in favor to these adopted 
frights, are consigned to the staircase and the lumber- 
room. In like manner his goodly shelves are one by one 
13 



194 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

stripped of Ms favorite old authors, to give place to a 
collection of presentation copies — the flour and bran of 
modern poetry. A presentation copy, reader — ^if haply 
you are yet innocent of such favors — is a copy of a hook 
which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his 
foolish autograph at the beginning of it ; for v/hich, if 
a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother 
author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does 
sell, in return. We can speak to experience, having by 
us a tolerable assortment of these gift-horses. Not to 
ride a metaphor to death, we are willing to acknowledge 
that in some gifts there is sense. A duplicate out of a 
friend's library (where he has more than one copy of a 
rare author) is intelligible. There are favors short of the 
pecuniary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among gentle- 
men — which confer as much grace upon the acceptor as 
the offerer. The kind, we confess, which is most to our 
palate, is of those little conciliatory missives, which for 
their vehicle generally choose sl hamper — ^little odd pres- 
ents of game, fruit, perhaps wine — though it is essential 
to the delicacy of the latter, that it be home-made. We 
love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our 
table by proxy; to apprehend his presence (though a 
hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose 
goodly aspect reflects to us his "plump corpusculum " ; 
to taste him in grouse or woodcock ; to feel him gliding 
down in the toast peculiar to the latter ; to concorporate 
him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to 
have him within ourselves, to know him intimately ; such 
participation is methinks unitive, as the old theologians 
phrase it. For these considerations we should be sorry 
if certain restrictive regulations, which are thought to 
bear hard upon the peasantry of this country, were en- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 195 

tirely done away with. A bare, as the law now stands, 
makes many friends. Oaius conciliates Titius (knowing 
his gout) with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting 
his partiality for them) passes them to Lucius ; who in 
his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his own, makes 
them over to Marcius ; till in their ever-widening pro- 
gress, and round of unconscious circum-migration, they 
distribute the seeds of harmony over half a parish. We 
are well disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances • 
and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens 
— impalpable to the palate — which, under the names of 
rings, lockets, keepsakes, amuse some people's fancy 
mightily. We could never away with these indigestible 
trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of 
friendship. 

That you must love me and love my dog. " Good sir, 
or madam — as it may be — we most willingly embrace the 
offer of your friendship. We have long known your ex- 
cellent qualities. We have wished to have you nearer to 
us ; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our 
heart. We can have no reserve toward a person of your 
open and noble nature. The frankness of your humor 
suits us exactly. We have been long looking for such a 
friend. Quick — let us disburthen our troubles into each 
other's bosom — let us make our single joys shine by re- 
duplication — But yap^ yap^ yap ! what is this confounded 
cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the 
bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg." 

" It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. 
Here, Test— Test— Test ! " 

" But he has bitten me." 

"Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better ac- 



196 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

quainted with him. I have had him three years. He 
never hites me." 

Yap, yap, y<^pj^— "He is at it again." 

" Oh, sir, you must not kick hira. He does not hke 
to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the 
respect due to myself." 

"But do you always take him out with you, when 
you go a friendship-hunting? " 

"Invariably. 'Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-con- 
ditioned animal. I call him my test — the touch-stone by 
which to try a friend. No one can properly be said to 
love me who does not love him." 

" Excuse us, dear sir — or madam, aforesaid — if upon 
further consideration we are obliged to decline the other- 
wise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like 
dogs." 

"Mighty well, sir. You know the conditions — you 
may have worse offers. Come- along. Test." 

The above dialogue is not so imaginary but that, in 
the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions 
of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these 
canine appendages. They do not always come in the 
shape of dogs ; they sometimes wear the more plausible 
and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, 
my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. 
"We could never yet form a friendship — not to speak 
of more delicate correspondence — however much to our 
taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, 
some impertinent clog affixed to the relation — the un- 
derstood dog in the proverb. The good things of life 
are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mix- 
ture; like a schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to 
the tail of it. What a delightful companion is . . . ., if 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 197 

he did not always bring his tall cousin with him ! He 
seems to grow with him; like some of those double 
births which we remember to have read of with such 
wonder and dehght in the old " Athenian Oracle," where 
Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what 
a beginning for him !) upon Sir William Temple. There 
is the picture of the brother, with the little brother 
peeping out at his shoulder; a species of fraternity 
which we have no name of kin close enough to compre- 
hend. When .... comes, poking in his head and 
shoulder into your room, as if to feel his entry, you 
think, surely you have now got him to yourself— what 
a three hours' chat we shall have! But ever in the 
haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well dis- 
closed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow 
of the cousin, overpeering his modest kinsman, and sure 
to overlay the expected good talk with his insufferable 
procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness 
of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone. 'Tis 
hard when a blessing comes accompanied. Can not we 
like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her 
eternal brother ? or know Sulpicia, without knowing all 
the round of her card-playing relations? Must my 
friend's brethren of necessity be mine also ? Must we be 
hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Sel- 
by the calico-printer, because W. S., who is neither, but 
a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a 
common parentage with them ? Let him lay down his 
brothers, and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of 
ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. 
Let F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle ; and Honorius 
dismiss his vapid wife and superfluous establishment of 
six boys — things between boy and manhood, too ripe for 



198 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA, 

play, too raw for conyersation — that come in, impudent- 
ly staring their father's old friend out of countenance ; 
and will neither aid, nor let alone, the conference : that 
we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were 
wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood. 

It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with 
these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this 
sense keep a dog. But when Eutilia hounds at you her 
tiger aunt ; or Euspina expects you to cherish and fondle 
her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into 
her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your con- 
stancy ; they must not complain if the house be rather thin 
of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent 
matches in her time, if she insisted upon all that loved 
her loving her dogs also. 

An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of 
Delia Cruscan memory. In tender youth he loved and 
courted a modest appendage to the Opera — in truth, a 
dancer — who had won him by the artless contrast be- 
tween her manners and situation. She seemed to him a 
native violet, that had been transplanted by some rude 
accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in 
truth, was she less genuine and sincere than she ap- 
peared to him. He wooed and won this flower. Only for 
appearance' sake, and for due honor to the bride's rela- 
tions, she craved that she might have the attendance of 
her friends and kindred at the approaching solemnity. 
The request was too amiable not to be conceded; and in 
this solicitude for conciliating the good will of mere rela- 
tions, he found a presage of her superior attentions to him- 
self when the golden shaft should have "killed the flock 
of all affections else." The morning came ; and at the 
Star 9,nd Garter, Richmond — the place appointed for the 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 199 

breakfasting — accompanied with one English friend, ho 
impatiently awaited what reenforcement the bride should 
bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had 
made. They came in six coaches — the whole corps de bal- 
let — French, Italian, men, and women. Monsieur de B., 
the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but 
craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna 
had sent her excuse, but the first and second BuJBfa were 
there ; and Signor Sc — , and Signora Oh — , and Madame 
V — , with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, 
figurantes ! at the sight of whom, Merry afterward de- 
clared, " then for the first time it struck him seriously 
that he was about to marry — a dancer." But there was 
no help for it. Besides, it was her day ; these were, in 
fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though 
whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride, 
handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary 
figure than the rest, presented to him as h^r father — the 
gentleman that was to give her away — no less a person 
than Signor Delpini himself — with a sort of pride, as 
much as to say, See what I have brought to do us hon- 
or ! — the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite 
overcame him ; and slipping away under some pretense 
from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry 
took horse from the back yard to the nearest seacoast, 
from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly 
after consoled himself with a more congenial match in 
the person of Miss Brunton ; relieved from his intended 
clown father, and a bevy of painted buffas for brides- 
maids. 

That we should rise with the larlc. — At what precise 
minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and 



200 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not 
naturalists euougli to determine. But for a mere human 
gentleman — that has no orchestra business to call him 
from his warm bed to such preposterous exercise — we 
take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this 
Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour at which 
he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think 
of it, we say ; for to do it in earnest requires another 
half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty 
sunrisings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad 
in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours be- 
for ewhat we have assigned, which a gentleman may see, 
as they say, only for getting up. But having been 
tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those 
ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are 
no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to at- 
tend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours 
of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observ- 
ances ; which have in them, besides, something Pagan 
and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our 
usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go 
a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but 
we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness 
and headaches ; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her 
sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail 
waking courses by the measures of that celestial and 
sleepless traveler. We deny not that there is something 
sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these 
break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start 
of a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. 
But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us ; and we 
pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the 
penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 201 

the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their 
clothes, or are already up and about their occupations, 
content to have svrallowed their sleep by wholesale, we 
choose to linger abed, and digest our dreams. It is the 
very time to recombine the wandering images which 
night in a confused mass presented ; to snatch them from 
forgetfulness ; to shape and mould them. Some people 
have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they 
gulp them too grossly to taste them curiously. We love 
to chew the cud of a foregone vision ; to collect the 
scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, 
with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to 
drag into daylight a struggling and half-vanishing night- 
mare; to handle and examine the terrors or the airy 
solaces. "We have too much respect for these spiritual 
communications to let them go so lightly. We are not 
80 stupid or so careless as that imperial forgetter of his 
dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the 
form of them. They seem to us to have as much signifi- 
cance as our waking concerns ; or rather to import us 
more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the 
shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have 
shaken hands with the world's business ; we have done 
with it ; we have discharged ourself of it. Why should 
we get up? We have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs 
to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth 
act. We have nothing here to expect but in a short time 
a sick-bed and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate 
death by such shadows as night affords. We are already 
half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in 
the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil be- 
tween us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed 
gray before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world 



202 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

already appear as but tlie vain stuff out of wliicli dramas 
are composed. "We have asked no more of life than what 
the mimic images in playhouses present us with. Even 
those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to 
have struck. We are supeeannuated. In this dearth of 
mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with 
shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The ab- 
stracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that 
spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we ex- 
pect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of 
the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and 
the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the 
less awkward at our first coming among them. We wil- 
lingly call a phantom our feUow, as knowing we shaU 
soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we 
cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet 
of the invisible world, and think we know already how 
it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while 
we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become 
familiar. We feel attenuated into their meager essences, 
and have given the hand of half-way approach to incor- 
poreal being. We once thought life to be something, 
but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. 
Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has 
no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get 
up? 

TJiat we sliould lie down with the lamb. — We could 
never quite understand the philosophy of this arrange- 
ment, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for 
instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when 
it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, 
and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. Hail, 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 203 

candlelight ! without disparagement to sun or moon, the 
kindliest luminary of the three — if we may not rather 
style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! 
We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by 
candlehght. They are everybody's sun and moon. This 
is our peculiar aud household planet. Wanting it, what 
savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, 
wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses ! They 
must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the 
dark. What repartees could have passed, when you 
must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbor's 
cheek to be sure that he understood it? This accounts 
for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a somber 
cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition 
of those unlanterned nights. Jokes came in with can- 
dles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they 
had any. " How did they sup ? What a melange of chance 
carving they must have made of it ! Here one had got 
a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's shoulder ; there 
another had dipped his scooped palm in a kid-skin of 
wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. — There 
is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, 
even in these civilized times, has never experienced this, 
when at some economic table he has commenced dining 
after dusk, and waited for the flavor till the lights came? 
The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can 
you tell pork from veal in the dark ? or distinguish Sher- 
ris from pure Malaga ? Take away the candle from the 
smoking man : by the glimmering of the left ashes, he 
knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by 
an inference ; till the restored light, coming in aid of the 
oKactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then 
how he redoubles his puffs ! how he burnishes ! — There 



204 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle- 
We have tried the affectation of a book at noonday in 
gardens, and in sultry arbors ; but it was labor thrown 
away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, 
hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will 
have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstrac- 
tions. By the midnight taper the writer digests his 
meditations. By the same light we must approach to 
their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odor. It 
is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoe- 
bus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. 
They are abstracted works — 

•» 
Things that were born when none but the still night 

And his dumb candle saw his pinching throes. 

Marry, driy light — daylight might furnish the images, 
the crude material ; but for the fine shapings, the true 
turning and filing (as mine author hath it), they must be 
content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The 
mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the 
domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and 
silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's "Morning 
Hymn in Paradise," we would hold a good wager, was 
penned at midnight ; and Taylor's rich description of a 
sunrise * smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in 
these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best-measured 
cadences (Prose has her cadences) not tinfrequ^ntly to 
the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the 
doors," or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even 
now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted 
courts our endeavors. We would indite something 
about the Solar System. — Betty ^ Iring the candles. 

*" Holy Dying." 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 205 

That great wit is allied to madness.— Bio far from 
this being true, the greatest wits will ever be found to 
be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to 
conceive of a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, 
by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be under- 
stood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the 
faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or 
excess of any one of them. " So strong a wit," says 
Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, 

"... did Nature to him frame, 
As all things but his judgment overcame ; 
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show. 
Tempering that mighty sea below." *" 

The ground of the fallacy is, that men, finding in the 
raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation 
to which they have no parallel in their own experience, 
besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and 
fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the 
poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is 
not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. 
In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native 
paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not in- 
toxicated ; he treads the burning marl without dismay ; 
he wings his flight without self-loss through realms of 
" chaos and old night." Or if, abandoning himseK to 
that severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is 
content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind 
(a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness 
nor this misanthropy so unchecked but that — never 
letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he 
seems to do so — he has his better genius still whispering 
at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner 



206 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

counsels, or witli the honest steward Flavins recommend- 
ing kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede 
from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From 
beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible ex- 
istences, he subjugates them to the law of her consis- 
tency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign direct- 
ress, even when he appears most to betray and desert 
her. His ideal tribes submit to policy ; his very mon- 
sters are tamed to his hand, even as the wild sea-brood 
shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them 
with attributes of flesh and blood, till tliey wonder at 
themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to 
European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to 
the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference) as 
Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and 
the little wits are differenced ; that if the latter wander 
ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose 
themselves and their readers. Their phantoms are law- 
less, their visions night-mares. They do not create, 
which implies shaping and consistency. Their imagina- 
tions are not active — for to be active is to call something 
into act and form — but passive, as men in sick dreams. 
For the supernatural, or something superadded to what 
we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natu^ 
ral. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucina- 
tions were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects 
out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might 
with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little 
wantonized ; but even in the describing of real and every- 
day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these 
lesser wits shall more deviate from nature — show more 
of that inconsequence which has a natural alliance with 
frenzy — ^than a great genius in his " maddest fits," as 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 207 

Withers somewiiere calls them. We appeal to any one 
that is aequainted with the common run of Lane's novels, 
as they existed some twenty or thirty years back — those 
scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading 
public, till a happier genius arose and expelled for ever 
the innutritious phantoms — whether he has not found 
his brain more " betossed," his memory more puzzled, 
his sense of when and where more confounded, among 
the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the in- 
consistent characters or no-characters of some third-rate 
love-intrigue — where the persons shall be a Lord Glen- 
damour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate 
between Bath and Bond Street— a more bewildering 
dreaminess induced upon him than he has felt wander- 
ing over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the pro- 
ductions we refer to, nothing but names and places is 
familiar ; the persons are neither of this world nor of any 
other conceivable one ; an endless string of activities 
without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive : we 
meet phantoms in known v^dXks—fantasques^ only christ- 
ened. In the poet we have names which announce fic- 
tion; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the 
things and persons of the "Fairy Queen" prate not 
of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, 
and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home 
and upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a 
dream ; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrie- 
ties of every-day occurrences. By what subtle art of 
tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not 
philosophers enough to explain ; but in that wonderful 
episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money 
God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then 
a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the trea- 



208 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

sures of the world, and has a daughter, Ambition, before 
whom all the world kneels for favors — with the Hespe- 
rian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing 
his hands vainlj, but not impertinently, in the same 
stream — that we should be at one moment in the tjave of 
an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of 
the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with 
the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and 
our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able 
nor willing to detect the fallacy — is a proof of that hid- 
den sanity which still guides the poet in the wildest seem- 
ing aberrations. 

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a 
copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some 
sort — but what a copy ! Let the most romantic of us, 
that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of 
some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the 
morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That 
which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while 
that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool ex- 
amination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, 
that we are ashamed to have been so deluded, and to 
have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. 
But the transitions in this episode are every whit as vio- 
lent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the wak- 
ing judgment ratifies them. 

That a sulky temper is a misfortune. — We grant that 
it is, and a very serious one — ^to a man's friends, and to 
all that have to do with him ; but whether the condition 
of the man himself is so much to be deplored may admit 
of a question. We can speak a little to it, being ourself 
but lately recovered — we whisper it in confidence, read- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 209 

er — out of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was 
the cure a blessing ? The conviction which wrought it 
came too clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful injuries 
— for they were mere fancies — which had provoked the 
humor. But the humor itself was too self -pleasing while 
it lasted — we know how bare we lay ourself in the con- 
fession — to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of 
it. We still brood over wrongs which we know to have 

been imaginary; and for our old acquaintance ^N" ^ 

whom we find to have been a truer friend than we took 
him for, we substitute some phantom — a Caius or a 
Titius — as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our 
yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to fall 
at once from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea 
of having been ill-used and contumaciously treated by 
an old friend. The first thing to aggrandize a man in 
his own conceit is to conceive of himself as neglected. 
There let him fix if he can. To undeceive him is to de- 
prive him of the most tickling morsel within the range 
of self-complacency. No flattery can come near it. 
Happy is he who suspects his friend of an injustice ; but 
supremely blest, who thinks all his friends in a conspiracy 
to depress and undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we 
sing not to the profane) far beyond the reach of all that 
the world counts joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in 
the depths, where the superficial seek it not, of discon- 
tent. Were we to recite one half of this mystery, which 
we were let into by our late dissatisfaction, all the world 
would be in love with disrespect; we should wear a 
slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would 
be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mys- 
terious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery 
ia unpalatable only in the commencement. The first 
14 



210 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

sting of a suspicion is grievous ; but wait — out of tliat 
wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, 
there is balm and honey to be extracted. Your friend 
passed you on such or such a day, having in his company 
one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed 
toward you — passed you in the street without notice. 
To be sure he is something short-sighted, and it was in 
your power to have accosted him. But facts and sane 
inferences are trifles to a true adept in the science of dis- 
satisfaction. He must have seen you ; and S , who 

was with him, must have been the cause of the contempt. 
It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. Go 
home, and make the worst of it, and you are a made 
man for this time. Shut yourself up, and — rejecting, as 
an enemy to your peace, every whispering suggestion 
that but insinuates there may be a mistake — reflect seri- 
ously upon the many lesser instances which you had be- 
gun to perceive, in proof of your friend's disaffection 
toward you. None of them singly was much to the pur- 
pose, but the aggregate weight is positive ; and you have 
this last affront to clench them. Thus far the process is 
anything but agreeable. But now to your relief comes 
in the comparative faculty. You conjure up all the kind 
feelings you have had for your friend ; what you have 
been to him, and what you would have been to him if 
he would have suffered you ; how you defended him in 
this or that place ; and his good name, his literary repu- 
tation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than your 
own! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns toward him. 
Ton could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. 
How say you ! do you not yet begin to apprehend a com- 
fort? some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters? 
Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat yourseK of your re- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 211 

versions. You are on vantage-ground. Enlarge your 
speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, as a 
spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them 
who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as 
water ? Begin to think that the relation itself is incon- 
sistent with mortality — that the very idea of friendship, 
with its component parts, as honor, fidelity, steadiness, 
exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to your- 
self, as the only possible friend in a world incapable 
of that communion. Now the gloom thickens. The 
little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage 
you through deeper glooms than this. You are not yet 
at the half-point of your elevation. You are not yet, 
believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the world 
in general (as these circles in the mind will spread to 
infinity), reflect with what strange injustice you have 
been treated in quarters where (setting gratitude and 
the expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras) 
you pretended no claim beyond justice, the naked due of 
all men. Think the very idea of right and fit fled from 
the earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle of it, till 
you have swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere ; 
the other being the vast Arabia Stony of your friends 
and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every mo- 
ment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen ; to 
deify yourself at the expense of your species ; to judge 
the world — this is the acme and supreme point of your 
mystery — these the true Pleasuees op Stjlkiness. We 
profess no more of this grand secret than what ourself 
experimented on one rainy afternoon in the last week, 
sulking in our study. We had proceeded to the penul- 
timate point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where 
the consideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in 



212 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. 

the meditation of general injustice — when a knock at 
the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend 
whose not seeing of us in the morning (for we will now 
confess the case our own), an accidental oversight, had 
given rise to so much agreeable generalization ! To mor- 
tify us still more, and take down the whole flattering 
superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he 

had brought in his band the identical S , in whose 

favor we had suspected him of the contumacy. Assev- 
erations were needless, where the frank manner of them 
both was convictive of the injurious nature of the sus- 
picion. "We fancied that they perceived our embarrass- 
ment, but were too proud, or something else, to confess 
to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the 
condition of the noble patient in Horace — 

Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedos, 
In vacuo laetus sessor plausorque theatro — 

and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the 
friendly hands that cured us — 

Pol, me occidistis, amici, 
Non servastis, ait ; cui sic extorta voluptas, 
El demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error. 

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